


and all at once (you are the one i have been waiting for)

by jemmasimmmons



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Bodyguard AU, F/M, Fake Dating, Friends to Lovers, Mutual Pining, Nightmares, Slow Burn, THERE WAS ONLY ONE BED, mild violence, most of the girls + mack make cameos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-15
Updated: 2020-05-10
Packaged: 2021-02-28 18:33:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 52,846
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23161780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jemmasimmmons/pseuds/jemmasimmmons
Summary: ‘You got me a what?’‘A bodyguard, Jemma. A personal protection officer, if you prefer. Whatever. I’ve hired you one.’When a break in at Flare Industries goes bad, Jemma is adamant that she doesn't need a bodyguard. Fitz just wants to do his job. How long before they realise they're better together? A bodyguard AU.
Relationships: Leo Fitz/Jemma Simmons
Comments: 190
Kudos: 206





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> i've been planning and writing this fic for about a year now, and i'm so glad it's finally finished! it's the longest fic i've ever written, for fs or otherwise, and i love this universe dearly. i hope you'll all like it as much as i do. i'll post chapter 2 tomorrow and then the rest of the chapters every three or four days.
> 
> the title comes from taylor swift's 'king of my heart'.
> 
> i hope you enjoy this! i'm on twitter @jemmasimmmons and tumblr @jeemmasimmons if you want to chat 💖

Jemma can’t believe her ears.

‘You got me a _what_?’

‘You heard me.’ Across the desk, Daisy is arranging her pens into height order. To anyone else she would appear cool and collected, as the founder of a high-profile tech company ought to be. Jemma, however, can see the tips of her ears turning pink. ‘A bodyguard, Jemma. A personal protection officer, if you prefer. Whatever. I’ve hired you one.’

Jemma shakes her head in disbelief.

‘You can’t be serious.’

‘Oh, I’m dead serious,’ Daisy tells her, lining up a ruler underneath her pens. ‘They’re starting tomorrow.’

A furious retort is on the tip of Jemma’s tongue but, suddenly remembering where they are, she rolls it back and glances over her shoulder. Unlike her own office, the doors and walls of Daisy’s are made of perfectly clear glass, so that she can see out to the workspace beyond. Dozens of their employees are milling about the floor, carrying boxes and clipboards and prototypes – a typical day at Flare Industries a few short months before a new product launch.

What is not so typical is the way the employees seem to slow down as they pass the office doors, taking the opportunity to sneak a peek at their CEO and her right-hand woman sitting inside. Jemma can only imagine what they think must be happening and when she looks away she can feel their eyes boring into the back of her head. She glares at Daisy.

‘Did you pull me in here so that you could tell me in front of everyone? To ensure that I wouldn’t make a scene?’

Daisy scoffs, her face now flushing crimson red. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about…’

‘Daisy…’

‘I pulled you in here so that I would have witnesses if you decided to murder me before I was done speaking.’

Jemma groans and drops her face into her hands. ‘I don’t need a bodyguard,’ she says through her fingers.

‘On the contrary,’ Daisy says uncomfortably, ‘given the situation, I kind of think that you do.’

At the mention of _the situation_ , as she and Daisy had taken to calling it, Jemma feels her whole body tense. She swallows, and lifts her head.

‘The last time we spoke to the police,’ she says, ‘they didn’t think protection on that level was necessary.’ This is true enough, although her case officer had added a poignant _yet_ that Jemma chooses to omit. ‘Did they call? Have they changed their minds?’

Daisy has focused on her pens again. ‘No.’

Something about the look on her friend’s face makes Jemma uneasy. She shifts in her chair.

‘ _Something_ has changed though, hasn’t it?’

Daisy sighs. ‘There have been some letters.’

Jemma’s heart thumps.

‘Let me see.’

‘No.’

‘Daisy!’

‘You’re not seeing them,’ Daisy repeats, a sudden fierceness in her eyes. ‘And that’s final. Plus,’ she adds in a somewhat softer tone, ‘I’m way better at hiding things than you are, so you’ll never find them either.’

Jemma gives a small snort, knowing exactly what she is referencing.

When Daisy had first started up Flare ten years ago, not everyone had been too happy about it. The world of technology was competitive and it didn’t appreciate the arrival of a young woman with big ideas to a game each of its players thought themselves a shoe in to win.

At the time, she and Jemma had been sharing an apartment. One day, Jemma had come home and been unable to open the door, thanks to a particularly thick piece of cardboard that someone had rammed underneath it. The cut-out letters plastered to the board spelt out a message of such bitter anger and threat that Jemma hadn’t known what to do with it. In the end, she’d panicked and shoved it in a place she’d hoped Daisy would never look.

This would have worked out perfectly well, had her friend not come home from work desperate for a gin & tonic and headed straight for the vegetable drawer in the fridge in search of a lemon.

At the thought of someone writing one of those letters to her, Jemma’s stomach knots painfully. She purses her lips.

‘Alright. Say I _do_ need a bodyguard,’ she says evenly. ‘Why do we have to hire someone new? What about Elena?’

Daisy’s brow furrows.

A year ago, their full-time chief of security, Mack, had left Flare to start up his own protection agency. It had been a blow to both of them but especially to Daisy, for whom Mack had acted as protection officer during big events and accompanied her to conventions and meet ups.

Before leaving, Mack had appointed his own replacement. Elena was just as vigilant as he had been and twice as quick at spotting potential problems. She and Daisy had initially clashed, but now worked seamlessly as a team.

‘I’ve already asked Elena to look at tightening security around the building,’ Daisy says. ‘Between that and preparing for the launch this fall, she’s got enough on her plate right now. It wouldn’t be fair to ask her to guard you too.’

Slumping in her chair, Jemma is frustrated to find angry tears pricking her eyes.

‘But _this_ isn’t fair. I don’t want a bodyguard,’ she says, knowing full well how petulant she sounds. ‘Having someone following me around all day, checking up on me, always being there…it will just make everything feel so…’

‘So what?’ Daisy says gently.

Jemma gives a bitter laugh and shakes her head. ‘So _abnormal_.’

Daisy sighs. Pressing a button by the side of her desk, she gets out of her chair. Behind her, Jemma can hear the blinds on the office door clicking shut, giving them a little privacy as her friend crouches in front of her.

‘Jemma,’ Daisy says, ‘things have been abnormal for a long time now, and they’re not going to change any time soon. Now, I’ve told the police about the letters and they don’t think the threat level is high enough yet to warrant giving you any protection of their own. But I’m not prepared to take that risk.’ She hesitates. ‘I’m not prepared to risk _you_.’

The wobble in her voice makes the tears building in Jemma’s eyes threaten to spill over. She sniffs.

‘I don’t like this,’ she warns, throwing Daisy a stern look. ‘And I don’t like that you’ve gone behind my back to do it.’

Daisy nods, looking a little guilty. ‘I know. But would you have given me your blessing if I’d asked first?’

Jemma thinks for a moment. ‘No.’

‘Exactly. And I would have done it anyway. All I’ve done is save us both a lot of time.’

Jemma rolls her eyes. ‘Right.’

‘If it helps,’ Daisy adds after a couple of moments, ‘this guy is from Mack’s agency. He hand-picked him, especially for you.’

This, as Daisy must have known all along, was her trump card. Jemma trusts Mack almost as much as she trusts Daisy. She sighs deeply, knowing that any further struggle was futile. She was defeated, as she was always going to be when she came up against Daisy’s unwavering will and determination. After almost a decade of working beside her best friend, Jemma ought to know that by now.

Though that didn’t necessarily mean that she had to lose with grace.

Jemma purses her lips and crosses her arms tightly over her chest.

‘I’ll meet with them,’ she concedes, ‘and then we can talk about hiring him.’

Daisy grins, her face bright with victory. She presses a quick kiss to Jemma’s cheek before bounding to her feet and reopening the blinds.

‘That’s cute, Jemma,’ she says cheerfully. ‘But there isn’t anything to talk about. I told you: he’s already hired.’

‘You’ve got me a _what_?’

Mack chuckles. ‘You know, Fitz, usually when someone tells you they got you a job, the appropriate response is _thank you_.’

Fitz shakes his head. In his lap, their takeaway hot drinks are growing hot as Mack pulls the car out of the parking garage and back onto the road.

‘Sorry. I guess I just wasn’t expecting it, since I’ve only been back at the agency for a couple of months.’

Mack nods, as if to acknowledge this. ‘True, but when the right job comes up, it comes up. And this is one that I think is right for you.’

He takes his latte from Fitz and slots it into the SUV’s drink’s holder. In return, Fitz receives a blue paper folder, one that he knows from previous experience will be full of a client’s notes and background. _His_ client’s notes and background. Fitz gulps, and takes a swig of his coffee before opening the file.

Inside, he finds a few pages of handwritten notes and a photograph paperclipped to them. The photo shows a young woman with dark hair, brown eyes, and a friendly smile.

‘Jemma Simmons,’ Mack says, putting a name to the face for him.

Fitz frowns, knowing that it sounded familiar but being unable to place it. Suddenly, his eyes widen. ‘As in Jemma Simmons of Flare Industries?’

Mack nods. ‘That’s the one.’

Fitz’s heart starts to beat out a frantic rhythm. He knows quite a lot about Flare Industries. For starters, it is one of the largest eco-tech companies in the world. Their founder, Daisy Johnson, is a well-known public figure, a key advocate for climate change awareness and a champion for women in STEM. Her second-in-command, Jemma Simmons, spends far less time in the public eye. Still, her name is recognisable enough for Fitz to have heard of her.

There is also one more thing he knows about Flare – before Mack started up SHIELD Agency, he had worked there for many years.

‘Why does she need a bodyguard?’ he asks.

Mack takes a moment to sip his coffee before answering. ‘Six weeks ago, Flare had a break in.’

Fitz’s eyebrows shoot up. Since Flare’s security system was based on Mack’s own failsafe design, this was highly irregular. ‘What did they take?’

‘Several tech specs, copies of important emails and documents, some coding built by the CEO herself.’ Mack pauses, clearly choosing his words very carefully. ‘But the problem isn’t what they took. It’s what they did.’

‘And what did they do?’

Reaching across the car, Mack taps the file Fitz is still holding in his hands. ‘Turn the page.’

Fitz does as he’s asked, flipping away from Jemma Simmons’ smiling face and finding himself staring at a document scrawled over with black pen. He registers that there is a name and personal details at the top of the page, an outline of a human body in the middle, and a phrase at the bottom which inevitably catches his eye. _Cause of death_ , Fitz reads. He swallows, hard.

‘Is this an autopsy report?’

Mack nods, grimly. ‘The thief was making his way up to the prototype department when he got interrupted. One of Flare’s interns was working late. Lucas James. He was nineteen.’

Fitz winces instinctively. He takes in the three markings on the outline of the body on the page which he knows represent bullet wounds. There are two on his stomach, and one slightly higher.

‘Poor kid,’ he murmurs.

‘Yeah,’ Mack sighs. ‘It’s tragic. Luckily, it only took them a couple of days to catch the guy.’

Fitz nods with satisfaction. Anyone who could shoot dead a boy who was little more than a child didn’t deserve to be running free.

‘What did they get him with?’ he asks, leafing through the file in search of the police report. ‘CCTV? DNA?’

‘Nope.’ Mack’s grip on the steering wheel tightens. ‘Somehow, he managed to override the cameras. Forensics swept the entire building and couldn’t find any finger-prints that weren’t meant to be there. Lucas’s body was wiped clean. And there’s nobody without a damn alibi caught on camera in a two mile radius.’

‘Well, then how…’ Suddenly, it all clicks together. With a sinking feeling, Fitz flips back to the front page of the file and to the warmth of Jemma Simmons’ eyes. ‘She saw it all, didn’t she?’

Mack nods. ‘Simmons was working late as well. She was the one who’d asked Lucas to stay with her, to run some final tests on a prototype. She was in her office when she heard the shots and saw the shooter through her keyhole. She gave a picture perfect description to the police and they tracked him down within forty eight hours.’ He scoffs. ‘The guy was so sure he wouldn’t get caught that he hadn’t even bothered to leave town.’

Fitz gazes down at the photograph in his hands. There is something about Jemma Simmons’ face that draws him to her, that makes him feel like he can trust her. Certainly, Lucas James had trusted her when he’d agreed to stay late at work, little knowing how his night would end. Fitz feels a shiver run down his spine as he wonders how a person with such compassion in their smile must feel about one of their employees dying right in front of their eyes.

Then, he frowns.

‘Wait a minute. If they already caught this guy, why does she need protection?’

‘Because,’ Mack says, ‘a week ago, the shooter’s five million dollar bail was posted. Anonymously.’

Fitz nods. Anyone who could offer that much money as bail was inherently suspicious. The fact that they’d done so anonymously made warning signs light up inside his mind.

‘Any suspects?’ he asks. ‘Does Flare have any competitors on the market?’

Mack snorts. ‘Oh, they’ve got plenty of them. The problem is will be narrowing them down to find out who has the resources to pull something like this off. But…’ he begins pointedly.

‘But,’ Fitz says with a sigh, ‘that’s not our job. I get it, Mack.’

‘Good.’ Mack turns on the indicator and pulls off the main road. ‘Because I need you to remember that.’

In front of them, Flare Industries rises up out of the concrete, a red and white brick multi-story with large grey-framed windows and their distinctive logo of a sunbeam hitting a grassy hill displayed over their doors – a nod to the company’s commitment to only using solar and geothermal energy sources for their products. It was what made Flare unique among their competition, and what was causing them to, day by day, inch out in front of them.

Looking up at the building, Fitz finds himself performing one of the exercises Mack had taught him when he’d first joined the agency. He scans the floors, taking in all possible entrances and exits and planning any potential routes for escape or entry. There are not many, he realises, that could not be caught on camera.

Mack pulls into a parking space next to the building and cuts the engine. When he turns towards him, Fitz can see a new seriousness in his eye.

‘The shooter’s trial isn’t until the fall, just a few days before Flare’s biggest product launch in years. He’s only been out for a week and already the company has received threats against whoever gave evidence to the police. Daisy is terrified that it’s only a matter of time before whoever is behind this finds out it was Simmons and makes sure she won’t be able to stand as witness at the trial.’

Fitz thinks about the three bullet marks on Lucas James’ autopsy and then about Jemma Simmons’ smile.

‘Without her,’ he says, ‘they don’t have any evidence.’

‘And the shooter goes free.’

Dropping the file onto his knees, Fitz presses his thumb and forefinger to his temples. He can feel a headache building.

‘Why me, Mack?’ he asks. ‘You could have picked anyone for this.’

‘I could have,’ Mack agrees, ‘but there are three reasons I picked you.’

‘Care to enlighten me?’

‘Well, first of all, and don’t take this the wrong way, Fitz, but you don’t exactly look like a bodyguard.’

Fitz is rather inclined to take this the wrong way, but decides it’s best to let it go. ‘And that’s relevant because…?’

‘Because as far as we know, while whoever’s behind this knows there was a witness, they don’t know who the witness is yet. Giving Simmons someone like me to tail her all day would kind of be a big giveaway that it’s her.’

It’s a fair point, but Fitz is rather begrudging to acknowledge it.

‘Secondly,’ Mack continues, ‘Daisy’s forewarned me that Simmons isn’t exactly going to be happy about this. She won’t want a bodyguard.’

Fitz groans. ‘Great.’

‘But I know Simmons, and I know you too. I think that she’ll like you and that the two of you will get along.’

‘I thought it wasn’t our job to be liked,’ Fitz jumps in. He is unable to stop a strain of bitterness leaking into his tone.

‘It’s not,’ Mack says firmly, ‘but it sure can make it a hell of a lot easier if we _are_.’

Fitz runs his tongue across the top of his teeth. ‘Okay. So that’s two reasons why you chose me. What’s the third?’

Mack gives a deep sigh. ‘Listen, Fitz, I worked with Daisy for a long time. When she came to me with this, she trusted me to pick somebody I knew could handle this job, who would be worthy of it. I’m not going to let her or Simmons down, which is why I chose you. I trust you, Fitz.’

Taken aback by the frankness of this speech, Fitz finds himself sinking lower in his seat.

He is torn. On one hand, he feels honoured that his friend and boss has such faith in him, is willing to trust him with a job that Fitz knows Mack feels so personally about. On the flip side, however, the fact that this case is so important to Mack only makes the weight of responsibility press even harder on his shoulders. In his stomach, dread is beginning to swirl.

Almost as if he’d read his mind, Mack leans over to clap him on the arm.

‘You can say no,’ he says quietly. ‘Of course you can. But you have to say no before we walk through those doors.’

He nods ahead of them, to the revolving glass doors leading to inside Flare and to the new job waiting beyond. In spite of himself, Fitz finds that he follows Mack’s lead and strains forward, trying to catch a glimpse of the world beyond the glass, maybe even to the person he was about to be bound to protect.

On his lap, his fingers catch on her photograph and he glances down. Jemma Simmons gazes back up at him, her smile just as constant and bright as before, and Fitz finds himself smiling too. It is no use fighting against the inevitable. He’d known from the first moment he’d seen her exactly how this car ride would end.

‘Thank you.’

Mack frowns. ‘What for?’

Closing the file on Jemma Simmons’ face, Fitz lifts it to hold it against his chest. Raising his eyes, he holds Mack’s gaze pointedly.

‘For the job.’

Mack breaks into a wide, relieved grin and heaves out a long breath.

‘You’re welcome.’ He tosses the car keys in his hand. ‘So, shall we go in and say hi or do you want to sit here all afternoon?’

Fitz manages to crack a small smile in return and opens the passenger door, making sure to take the client file with him as he does. Given the heightened need for confidentiality on this job, it wouldn’t do to leave such vital documents lying about.

He is just tucking it underneath his arm and moving around the car when Mack hesitates.

‘Fitz. One more thing.’

‘Oh, yeah? What’s that?’

Mack’s demeanour falls serious again, as he fixes him with a look. ‘You can’t make the same mistake twice.’

Fitz swallows hard, feeling his face flush with the sting of embarrassment and guilt. He’d wondered how long it would take for Mack to bring that up.

‘I won’t make _any_ mistakes this time,’ he says firmly. ‘And that’s a promise.’

But, as he turns to follow Mack inside, Fitz is already worrying about how hard it will be to keep his word.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "‘Well, if we’re doing introductions…’ She holds out her hand to him. ‘Jemma Simmons. I’d say it’s nice to meet you but to be perfectly honest, Fitz, I’d really rather you weren’t here.’
> 
> Her grip is more comfortable than Daisy’s had been, but as she says this Fitz finds himself pulling away with a jolt. Clearly noticing this, Jemma gives him a tense smile.
> 
> ‘Please don’t take that personally.’
> 
> And, although he very easily could, Fitz finds that he doesn’t. It was an occupational hazard: while bodyguards were always needed, understandably they were very rarely wanted by their clients. After all, nobody ever wanted to admit that they weren’t able to protect themselves."
> 
> Introductions and first impressions.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'll post the next chapter on thursday and then every three days after that! thank you for your kind comments and kudos <3

The lobby of Flare Industries looks nothing like what Fitz had expected.

In his time, he’d been inside the receptions of any number of large businesses and corporations, and all of them had looked the same. White walls, white furniture, high ceilings, and maybe a potted plant by the receptionist’s desk.

Flare’s foyer looked nothing like that. Its ceilings were low, and its walls had the same red and white brickwork that Fitz had seen outside. There were trailing plants and succulents hanging from yellow pots fixed against the walls. It still feels like a professional place, but there is an approachability about the space that marks it out, yet again, from its competitors.

The desk, as they approach it to receive their lanyards, is made of glass, and the receptionist gives them a friendly smile as he checks their IDs. Mack’s lanyard has the word visitor printed on it in white, whereas Fitz’s is plain black.

‘We’ll take your ID photo tomorrow,’ the receptionist assures him, ‘and get you an access card for the building as well.’

Fitz gives him a weak smile and thanks him.

Mack clears his throat. ‘Are they waiting for us, Rick?’

‘They certainly are, Mr Mackenzie,’ Rick says with a twinkle in his eye. He points over his shoulder to a collection of navy blue sofas with yellow cushions clustered near the stairs. ‘Miss Johnson and Miss Simmons are ready to see you now.’

Sitting on the sofa furthest from them, Fitz can see two women, their heads bent close together in what looks like a fairly heated conversation. As they approach, he watches as one of the women, who he recognises as Daisy Johnson, founder and CEO of Flare Industries, gives a quick rap to the other woman’s knee and leaps to her feat. She beams.

‘Mack.’

‘Daisy,’ Mack responds, grinning back at her. He leans over and gives her a one armed hug. ‘It’s good to see you.’

‘Likewise,’ Daisy says, pulling out of the hug to lightly punch his biceps. She hesitates, letting her gaze move past him to where Fitz is standing, his hands stuffed awkwardly in his pockets. ‘I just wish it was under better circumstances.’

Mack sighs. ‘Yeah, me too.’

As they’ve been talking, the other woman on the sofa has stood up and come to hover next to Daisy. Her hair is shorter, and the bright openness of her smile has been replaced by a tense cautiousness, but Fitz still has no problem recognising Jemma Simmons from her photograph. His heart starts to hammer, and he can feel his mouth growing increasingly dry.

‘Daisy, Simmons…’ Mack steps back to clap Fitz on the shoulder. ‘I’d like you to meet Leopold Fitz.’

Fitz watches, as Daisy throws a meaningful glance at Jemma before offering out her hand for him to shake. ‘It’s nice to meet you, Fitz. Welcome to Flare.’

‘Uh, yeah.’ Fitz takes her hand; she grasps it maybe a little too tightly. ‘I’m really happy to be here.’

Almost as soon as the words are out of his mouth, he winces. Happy had definitely been the wrong word, it made it sound like he was happy one of their employees had been murdered and another was receiving death threats.

He sees Jemma raise one eyebrow, fleetingly, and her arms fold across her chest.

‘Okay.’ Daisy claps her hands together, taking charge of what was clearly a sinking situation. ‘So, Mack, you and I have a couple of things to discuss. If we just…’

She takes Mack’s arm and drags him back to the receptionist’s desk, leaving Fitz alone for the first time with Jemma Simmons, the woman who it was now his job to protect.

For a few seconds, neither of them speak. Fitz finds himself staring at her, comparing the features in front of him to the ones he’d examined on the photograph earlier. As well as her hair and the forcedness of her expression, he also notes deep circles under her eyes that hadn’t been there before. He isn’t surprised. If what was happening to her was happening to him he wouldn’t be able to sleep much either.

He finds himself desperately wanting to apologise to her, to tell her how sorry he is that the path her life has taken has led her to this. But he doesn’t want to sound pitying, and the right words trip on his tongue, and all that can come out instead is, ‘I’m Fitz.’

Jemma blinks at him. ‘Yes, I’m aware. Mack just said.’

‘Oh. Right. Of course he did.’

A flicker of bemusement passes over her face, animating her features. Then, it vanishes.

‘Well, if we’re doing introductions…’ She holds out her hand to him. ‘Jemma Simmons. I’d say it’s nice to meet you but to be perfectly honest, Fitz, I’d really rather you weren’t here.’

Her grip is more comfortable than Daisy’s had been, but as she says this Fitz finds himself pulling away with a jolt. Clearly noticing this, Jemma gives him a tense smile.

‘Please don’t take that personally.’

And, although he very easily could, Fitz finds that he doesn’t. It was an occupational hazard: while bodyguards were always needed, understandably they were very rarely wanted by their clients. After all, nobody ever wanted to admit that they weren’t able to protect themselves.

Jemma glances at him, her eyes landing on the blue folder still tucked underneath his arm. She points to it.

‘I see you’ve already received your brief,’ she says.

‘Uh, yeah.’ Fitz runs his fingers over the file. ‘Told me everything I needed to know.’

He realises a moment too late that this is, once again, entirely the wrong thing to say. Jemma’s face crumples, her smile slipping from her face, and she seems to shrink from him. Fitz feels a pang in the centre of his chest and struggles to piece together something to say that will amend his mistake, but he doesn’t have enough time.

Daisy and Mack return to them, having been stood to one side and talking quietly together. Daisy glances between him and Jemma like an anxious parent at a playdate. From the looks on her and Mack’s faces, Fitz gets the feeling that if it _had_ been a playdate he wouldn’t have gotten a second one.

‘Everything okay here?’ Daisy asks, her eyes flicking up and down Jemma’s downturned face. Her friend gives a terse nod.

‘Yes. Perfectly, thank you.’

‘Okay.’ Daisy’s eyes narrow momentarily, but then she tries a tentative smile. ‘That’s good. Oh, Fitz,’ she says, turning to him. ‘There’s been a slight change of plans. If you’re happy to, we’d like you to start this afternoon. Rick will take you to get your access card and photo ID now, if that’s alright.’

‘Um…’ Fitz hesitates, glancing up at Mack who gives him an encouraging nod. ‘Sure. Yeah, that’s fine with me.’

‘Wonderful,’ he hears Jemma mutter darkly under her breath. Raising her voice, she says to Daisy, ‘I’ll be in my office. Nice to see you, Mack.’

Without waiting for a reply from either of them, and without saying a word in Fitz’s direction, she turns her back and stalks off towards the stairs. A little bit shocked by her rudeness, Fitz glances to Mack and Daisy, just in time to watch them share a look. Inside his closed fists, he can feel his palms start to sweat.

‘Sorry about that,’ Daisy says with a grimace. ‘Things have been pretty high strung around here for a while.’ Across the lobby, an assistant with a clipboard is waving her arms frantically. ‘Speaking of which…’

With a pat to Mack’s arm, she takes off, the black converses she is wearing beneath her pant suit making no noise as she hurries across the wooden floor.

Exhaling deeply, Mack turns to Fitz. ‘You good?’

_No_ , Fitz wants to tell him. Suddenly, he doesn’t feel worthy of this job, doesn’t feel capable of all it’s asking of him. He is worried about the responsibility it will lay on his shoulders and he is worried that, once again, he will let the people relying on him down.

He is terrified that in the moment she needs him most, he will let Jemma Simmons down.

‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘I’m good.’

Ignoring her impulse to sprint, Jemma forces herself to take the stairs one at a time, her hands folded calmly in front of her and her eyes fixed straight ahead.

She desperately wants to hide herself away in her office, but of course she can’t. On her way up, she is approached by three separate department supervisors, all wanting her advice or her signature on some important document. Jemma greets them all with a friendly smile and acquiesces freely with their requests, signing with the pen she always keeps tucked behind her ear and making suggestions born from years of experience. Each one leaves her with a lighter heart, while Jemma’s grows heavier and heavier the closer she gets to her office.

Finally, she makes it across the prototype department and her hand closes on her office door handle. Throwing herself inside, Jemma locks the door and sinks down it until she is sitting on the carpet. The tears she has been holding back since the lobby rise up in her throat and she closes her eyes, tilting her head back to ease the burning sensation.

Before she can truly indulge in a good cry, however, the phone on her desk rings.

Sniffing hard, Jemma passes her hand under her nose and struggles to her feet.

‘Hello?’

‘You weren’t nice,’ Daisy’s voice on the other end says accusingly.

Jemma rolls her eyes and sinks into the chair behind her desk. ‘I wasn’t aware I _had_ to be nice.’

‘Uh, since you have to work with the guy for the foreseeable future and you’re not stupid, I’d kind of assumed it would be a given.’

‘Well,’ Jemma says blithely, ‘you shouldn’t have assumed anything.’

There is a deep groan on the other end, followed by a hollow thud. Knowing Daisy as well as she does, Jemma imagines that her friend has dropped her head into her hands. When she speaks again, her voice sounds muffled, confirming her suspicion.

‘Jemma, come on. Please don’t be difficult about this.’

Jemma bristles, annoyed. ‘I’m not being difficult,’ she insists. ‘And even if I was, I think I have a right to be! You sprung this on me, gave me no warning, no time for preparation…’

‘How,’ Daisy ponders out loud, ‘does one _prepare_ to have a bodyguard?’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ Jemma snaps, ‘I never had the time to!’

On the other end of the phone, Daisy falls silent. A lump rises in Jemma’s throat and she rubs wearily at her eyes, wishing she could take the retort back.

In all their years working together, she and Daisy have fallen out so rarely that Jemma can’t even remember the last time it had happened. Sure, as friends they had spats now and then, and as roommates they’d had even more – but those were always over trivial things, like who had used the last of the milk without replacing it and who was taking too long in the bathroom. Professionally, they had almost never raised their voices to one another, and now that they have, Jemma feels a little bit sick.

‘Okay,’ Daisy says eventually, evidently thinking the same thing. ‘You’re right and I’m sorry. I…I know I probably went about this the wrong way, and if I could do it again, I’d do it differently. It wasn’t fair of me to organise this all behind your back.’

Jemma nods, even though Daisy can’t see her. The tightness squeezes her chest loosens its grip a little. ‘I’m sorry too,’ she admits. ‘I didn’t mean to snap at you. I just…’ She sighs. ‘I just wish this wasn’t happening.’

‘Yeah,’ Daisy says softly. ‘Me too.’

They are both quiet for a few moments. Jemma leans back in her chair, tucking her legs up underneath her. She feels a little comforted by their mutual apologies, but even the knowledge that Daisy isn’t angry with her isn’t enough to completely set things to right.

Clearly, Daisy is thinking the same thing, as she heaves a heavy sigh.

‘What can I do to stop you from doing anything stupid?’

Jemma gives a gentle snort. ‘Daisy, I can promise you I won’t do anything stupid. I may not like it, but I have a bodyguard now.’ The words sound odd in her mouth, but she bites her lip and powers through them. ‘I just have to get used to it, I suppose.’

‘I’m glad to hear that, but you’ve kind of made me feel bad now. Tell me what I can do.’

Twisting the phone cord around her fingers, Jemma thinks. ‘I want his services to be low level security,’ she decides. ‘In fact, I want them limited to when I’m at work. He doesn’t follow me home and he doesn’t guard me at weekends. I don’t want to feel like my life isn’t my own anymore.’

It is a lot to ask. Initially, Daisy had planned for Fitz to be with her around the clock – she’d even gone so far as to send her PA over to Jemma’s apartment to put clean sheets on the spare bed. But the thought of someone she hardly knew – let alone knew enough to _like_ – being with her every moment of the day made Jemma’s palms sweat and her pulse quicken so much it felt like her heart wanted to escape from her ribs. If she was going to get through the next few months, she was going to need some time and space to herself so that the weight of her responsibility didn’t suffocate her.

Jemma can feel Daisy’s hesitation down the phone, practically see her friend mulling the request over, mentally debating the possibilities. She hardly dares breathe as she waits for her response.

‘He drives you home after work,’ Daisy offers eventually. ‘Then he goes. It’s a compromise, Jemma.’

‘It is,’ Jemma agrees. ‘And it’s a good one.’

She hears Daisy let out a long sigh of relief. ‘Great. It’s a deal. So, you’ll be nice to him now?’

‘I’ll think about it.’

‘Well, you’d better start thinking faster. He’s on his way up to you right now. Do you remember the plan?’

‘Yes, Daisy,’ Jemma says wearily, ‘I remember the plan.’

‘Okay, good. And, Jemma?’

‘Yes?’

‘ _Please_ try to be convincing.’

Jemma rolls her eyes. ‘Bye, Daisy.’

Clicking the phone back into its cradle, Jemma pushes her chair away from her desk. It spins, turning her towards the window, where she can see skyscrapers and cranes stretching ever onwards towards the horizon.

Watching the way the sun bounced off the multitude of glass panes, Jemma is struck by the thought that, somewhere out there, there was someone who wanted to hurt her. Someone who wished that she’d disappear from the face of the earth and might to go extreme lengths to make sure that she did.

Resting on the arms of her chair, Jemma’s fingers start to tremble. Sucking in a deep breath, she curls them into fists and gets up off her chair.

Turning away from the window, she moves to her office door. Staring at it for too long brings back a wave of memories that Jemma would much rather stay buried, so she pushes back her pang of guilt and reaches for the door handle.

Outside, the prototype department is bustling. Flare’s technicians pass from one desk to the other, handing over paperwork and discussing ideas. There is a busy hum to the air, and Jemma catches snippets of conversations, titbits that would ordinarily have captured her attention and made her move to join in the conversation. Today, though, her focus is drawn to the newcomer in the room instead.

Fitz is standing awkwardly in the doorway to the stairwell, rubbing his hands together as he glances across the floor. He seems oblivious to her, so Jemma takes the opportunity to watch him for a moment.

Back in the lobby, she’d felt too cornered, too defensive, to even look at him properly. Now, she can see that he is older than she’d first thought – probably about her own age. The lack of confidence she’d sensed when he spoke is confirmed by the look on his face as he scans the room. He seems anxious, on high alert for some unknown, unseen danger. Mack, Jemma thinks with a twist of unease, had never looked like that, nor did Elena. She wonders how her friends could be asking her to put her trust in this man, who didn’t even look like he fully trusted himself.

Fighting back her uncertainty, Jemma pins what she hopes is a convincing smile to her lips and steps forward. Leo Fitz might not know what is required of him, but she does.

‘Fitz,’ she calls out cheerfully. ‘There you are! I was wondering what was keeping you!’

Suddenly, all eyes in the department are on her. Her heart pounding in her ears, Jemma tries to glide smoothly across the floor towards Fitz, who is staring at her as if she’s grown a second head. Jemma can’t really blame him. This enthusiastic reception is rather different to their frosty introduction.

Meeting him by the door, Jemma continues to smile as she takes his hand and gives it a warning squeeze. Glancing up, she looks him in the eye. _Play along_ , she tells him.

Luckily, Fitz seems to understand. Jemma sees him swallow, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat, then he clears his throat.

‘Uh, yeah. It’s me.’

Good Lord. His improvisation skills were even worse than hers.

Out of the corner of her eye, Jemma can see people peering around their desks to watch the scene playing out in front of them. Acutely aware that she needs to move this charade along before either she or Fitz give it up, she tugs him forward.

‘This will be your desk,’ she announces loudly, lifting her voice so that it carries across the department. She points to the workspace nearest her office, with its door in full view and easily accessible. ‘Everything is all set up for you to begin.’

‘Yes,’ Fitz replies, so mechanically Jemma almost winces. There is a tinge of panic to his voice too, as though he can’t quite figure out what she wants him to say. ‘Thank you.’

Noting flickers of suspicion in her employees’ faces, Jemma decides they need to get out of ear and eye shot sooner rather than later. The corners of her mouth are beginning to ache with the effort of keeping the smile on her face.

‘If you’d like to step into my office, Fitz,’ she says, waving her arm in a theatrical gesture towards the door, ‘then we can discuss, um…’ She falters, licking her lips before trying again, ‘we’ll need to talk about the, uh…’

Jemma’s cheeks grow hotter and hotter as she realises she has completely forgotten the excuse Daisy had given her to say. Instinctively, she looks to Fitz. She must have a plea for help written all over her face, because he leaps to the rescue.

‘About the holiday!’ he blurts. ‘Uh, my holiday, I mean. The one I need time off for.’

‘Right!’ Feeling hot relief wash over her, Jemma flashes him a genuine, grateful smile before she can stop herself. ‘Of course. If you’d like to, um…’

She ducks her head and makes for the office, hearing Fitz’s footsteps follow swiftly behind her. When she closes the door behind them, they both give matching sighs of relief.

With her hand still firmly pressed on the back of the door, Jemma looks up. What she sees surprises her. Almost instantly, Fitz’s expression has changed, from one of baffled befuddlement to careful consideration. His eyes have narrowed and his lips are pulled taunt. She can practically see the cogs turning in his mind as he processes the events of the last few minutes.

‘So,’ he says, ‘what story have they been told?’

In spite of herself, Jemma is impressed. Initially, she’d assumed this was Fitz’s first job, and had been mildly insulted that Mack would choose such a novice for her. Now though, she is quickly re-evaluating that assumption. The way in which he’d gotten over his confusion, and quickly perceived that whatever her employees thought he was here for it certainly wasn’t to be her protection officer, told her that he had some experience at least. She regards him with new eyes.

‘They think that you’re my new intern,’ she says.

Fitz raises one eyebrow. ‘A thirty-year-old intern?’

‘It’s been known to happen.’ Lifting her chin, Jemma folds her arms. ‘Our intern before Lucas was thirty-three.’

Even mentioning Lucas’s name makes her heart twinge, like a string inside has been rudely plucked. She is surprised to see that it makes Fitz flinch too, as if he is embarrassed to have made her call him to mind. His frown deepens.

‘Why can’t they just be told the truth?’

Jemma purses her lips. ‘Daisy’s suspicious,’ she says. ‘She thinks that we might have a mole.’

This time, both of Fitz’s eyebrows shoot up. ‘Do _you_ think that?’

Jemma hesitates, out of habit more than anything else. For the last few weeks, she and Daisy have put all their energy into making sure their employees knew only what they needed to know, to stop them from panicking or being put in danger. She has gotten so used to evading discussion, so used to keeping secrets, that the thought of telling Fitz things so openly feels almost alien.

Understandably, he misinterprets her reluctance.

‘Sorry,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘It’s not my place to ask.’

Jemma considers him quietly for a moment before making up her mind.

‘No,’ she tells him, choosing her words carefully. ‘I don’t think so, and not just because I don’t want to believe that someone I’ve worked with for a long time would want to harm me. Flare is doing really well. We’ve just issued pay rises and are always asking how we can make our working environment better. Our employees are happy – they feel seen. I can’t imagine any one of them risking that by choosing to spy for one of our rivals.’

Fitz nods, as though this makes sense, and just for a moment Jemma wonders whether she could have been wrong about all this. Maybe it will be good for her to have someone to talk to, someone who could help her process all of this instead of jump immediately into solutions like Daisy does. Just for a moment, she feels hope lift inside her chest.

Then, Fitz blinks like he is pulling himself out of a trance and the moment passes.

‘I’d, uh, best be getting back to my desk,’ he says. ‘And I’ll be by the car at the end of the day to take you home. It’s the black Volvo parked in the top right corner.’

Jemma nods. ‘Black Volvo. Got it.’

‘Okay.’ Fitz nods back, stiffly, and reaches for the door handle. ‘I’ll see you then.’

Once he is gone, Jemma sits at her desk, her limbs feeling heavy and tired. She is embarrassed to find her eyes filling with tears of disappointment, and she brushes them away furiously.

Fitz might not have been what she’d first expected, but, as he’d just reminded her, he was still her bodyguard. Her life had changed now, perhaps forever, and today was only the beginning.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "This time, Fitz’s panic is beginning to spike. The first rule of being a protection officer was to never let the person you were protecting out of your sight, and what had he done? Now he had no idea where Jemma had gone and in the time it could take him to find her, anything could happen.
> 
> A sudden sound behind him makes him spin on his heels. A girl he recognises from the prototype department has stepped out of a swinging door, wiping her hands on her skirt. As she heads back to the office, Fitz notices the sign on the door she’d emerged from and his heart lifts.
> 
> Normally, he wasn’t in the habit of charging into the ladies’ loos uninvited. But in this situation, he felt like it was justified."
> 
> Rooftops and corners.

When she’d first been told she was getting a bodyguard, Jemma had known how smothered it would make her feel. It had been the main reason she’d balked at the idea, why she’d protested against it so hard. She already felt trapped by her situation. Having someone around the whole time whose entire purpose was to protect her only served as a reminder of how much danger she was in. It felt like a punishment rather than a precaution.

So, Jemma had been prepared for the suffocation. What she had never anticipated was how exhausted she would be from it.

Even before she’d met Fitz, she’d been having trouble sleeping. The stillness of the night brought back bad memories, of compatible silence shattered by gunshots. Jemma would find herself hovering on the edge of sleep, grateful for the impending oblivion, only for her stomach to lurch and her eyes to fly back open as she heard the cracks again. She’d sit up in bed, shivering, until exhaustion eventually took over and she’d sleep until the thin dawn light awoke her.

None of that had changed, but now she had to set an alarm. Fitz came to pick her up in the black Volvo at eight fifteen precisely, which meant that Jemma now had to drag herself out of bed at six on the dot. She showers and dresses, before half-heartedly stirring a spoon through a bowl of muesli. She is ready and waiting by a quarter to eight, just in case Fitz is early. He never is.

When she catches herself falling asleep at her desk, Jemma wants to stamp her foot in frustration. Fitz has only been working with her for a week. How on earth is she supposed to last long enough to make it to the trial seven months from now?

Fitz stifles a yawn as he pulls up outside Jemma’s apartment block. He has never been a morning person, and these early starts to get her to Flare before any other employees saw them are beginning to take their toll on him.

He sends her a simple text saying that he is outside, and, while he can see that she has read it, receives no reply. That doesn’t matter. He knows she will be down in a moment anyway, like she always is.

Sighing, Fitz takes the opportunity to drink from the flask he kept beside him. The warmth of the tea wakes him up a little, but it does nothing to dispel the hunger growling in his stomach. He pats his belly, hoping it would refrain from grumbling when Jemma got in the car.

As if he’d summoned her, the back passenger door opens and Jemma climbs in. Briefly, she meets his eye in the rear view window.

‘Morning.’

Fitz wants to say _good morning_ back, but his mouth is still full of tea. By the time he has swallowed it, the moment has passed. Slotting his flask back into its holder, he pulls off the curb.

At Flare, Jemma heads straight for her office while Fitz meets with Elena, the head of security, for his daily briefing. He likes Elena. She speaks his language and actually seems happy to have him working with them – but she is always busy. Whenever she and Fitz speak, she is on her way from one job to another, and he often finds himself having to jog to keep up with her quickening footsteps. The fast pace of her work at Flare couldn’t be more different from what Fitz himself is experiencing.

Once the other employees start arriving, Fitz follows their lead and sits down at his desk. Although he tries to ignoring it, there is a sinking feeling in his chest. Today, like every day since he started this job, he will probably not leave his chair until five o’clock, when it is time to drive Jemma home.

It’s a slow morning. After checking the building’s security feed a couple of times, Fitz takes to playing Solitaire on his computer screen, hoping to give the impression to anyone passing by that he is acting as any conscientious intern would and is staying out of their way.

Around lunchtime, however, things start getting busier. Jemma’s door is approached by multiple people in swift succession. Fitz glances up from the ham sandwich he is eating beneath the desk, watching them hold their access card to the panel beside it to be granted access. He listens, his eyes narrowing as he hears Jemma’s voice from inside grow increasingly fraught with every visitor.

He almost jumps to his feet, dropping crumbs to the floor, when the door suddenly bursts open and Jemma comes out. Her face is strained and she is walking fast, hurrying across the room to the door. Fitz’s heart lurches as she disappears from sight and he is about to scramble up and follow her when he stops himself.

His job here only works if he avoids calling suspicion on himself. No ordinary intern would scurry after the boss as soon as she left the room. He bites his lip but he stays put, until the people around him have resumed their usual tasks. Then, he counts to thirty and gets up.

Jemma is not out in the hallway. When Fitz steps forward to glance down the stairwell, he can’t see her heading for the ground floor either. Swallowing back his unease, he turns to look back down the corridor. A sign leading to the development lab catches his eye. Maybe Jemma had gone in there to help with a prototype.

The development lab looks out onto the back car park, with floor to ceiling windows and long white benches where Flare’s technicians tinkered with their products. It is not a place Fitz has had much need to go, despite his curiosity about the prototypes so intriguing someone had broken into the building just to get their hands on their specs.

He knocks cautiously on the sliding door, then uses his access card to open it. Inside, two technicians look up from their work in annoyance. One of them lifts a hand to her hip.

‘Yes?’ she says crisply. ‘Can we help you?’

It’s a fairly rude greeting, but, then again, she thinks he’s just an intern. Besides, Fitz has bigger issues right now.

‘Have, uh, either of you seen Miss Simmons?’

The second technician shakes his head. ‘Not today. But, when you find her, please tell her we need to see her too. We need to discuss changes to the new Sunburst Laptop model urgently.’

Fitz gives him a vague nod, but he isn’t really listening. The door slides shut behind him, leaving him alone in the hallway once again.

This time, Fitz’s panic is beginning to spike. The first rule of being a protection officer was to never let the person you were protecting out of your sight, and what had he done? Now he had no idea where Jemma had gone and in the time it could take him to find her, anything could happen.

A sudden sound behind him makes him spin on his heels. A girl he recognises from the prototype department has stepped out of a swinging door, wiping her hands on her skirt. As she heads back to the office, Fitz notices the sign on the door she’d emerged from and his heart lifts.

Normally, he wasn’t in the habit of charging into the ladies’ loos uninvited. But in this situation, he felt like it was justified.

Quickly scanning the corridor to make sure no one is watching, Fitz covers his eyes with his hand and reaches for the door. He misses it, twice, but on his third go he makes contact and manages to push the door open.

‘Um, hello?’ he calls. ‘Jemma?’

No answer. Disappointed, Fitz uncovers his eyes a finger at a time to gaze at the empty bathroom. His eye falls on a window next to the stalls, open on the latch. While the window is small, it is not high enough off the ground for a person to be not able to climb up and slip out of it if they chose to.

Moving over to it, Fitz pushes it open. The window leads to a small balcony, almost like a fire-exit, except the metal ladder attached to the wall leads up instead of down. Since they are on the top floor but one, he assumes that if one was to climb it, one would reach the roof. He can only imagine how quiet it must be up there compared to a busy office.

Taking a deep breath, Fitz climbs onto the window ledge and edges out. He tries not to look down as he jumps onto the balcony, feeling the metal bars shudder under his weight. He suppresses a shudder of his own as he puts his foot on the first rung of the ladder. He’d never appreciated until now just how _tall_ the Flare building was.

Fitz climbs the ladder as fast as he can and hops over the small ledge leading to the roof. And then, suddenly, he is at the top of the building with the wind whipping at his cheeks. It is cold up here and Fitz shivers. He wishes he’d brought his jumper when he’d left his desk.

‘Fitz?’

The voice comes from behind him and makes him jump. Turning towards it, Fitz sees Jemma sitting with her back to the ledge, her knees pulled up to her chest. In the wind, her hair has wriggled free of its neat ponytail and she is staring at him with surprise, as though he has just emerged into Narnia from a wardrobe. She shakes her head in disbelief.

‘What on earth are you doing up here?’

Suddenly, Fitz finds himself struck with a flare of annoyance. All that time he’d spent running around, worrying about something happening to her on his watch, and she’d been up here all along. Clearly it hadn’t even occurred to her to tell him where she was going – even though she knew he was responsible for her safety. It was like she didn’t even care.

‘I think the better question,’ he says, hearing the edge to his voice as he speaks, ‘is what the hell are _you_ doing up here? You just left! You can’t do that anymore, Jemma. Anything could have happened to you and I wouldn’t have had any idea where you were!’

Fitz sucks in a breath, fully expecting her to snap back at him. From what he has seen, she’s had a bad day already, and him shouting at her could just be enough to push her over the edge.

For the briefest of moments, he is almost proved right. Jemma’s eyes narrow and she pushes her body forward, as though she is priming for a fight. Then, her shoulders sag. For the first time, Fitz notices the tears on her cheeks and the red rims beneath her eyes.

His irritation dissipates as quickly as it had sprung up, replaced by an awkward guilt. He has been so focused on how boring his new job is, how little has been required of him so far and how mundane his days have been. He has completely forgotten that, for Jemma, this is probably the hardest thing she has ever had to go through.

Fitz licks his lips, preparing to apologise. But before he can, Jemma wipes her eyes with her hand and gets to her feet.

‘We ought to be getting back.’

She steps past him to the ladder and Fitz feels a shiver run down his spine that has nothing to do with how cold he is.

Back in the ladies’ bathroom, he jumps to the ground after Jemma and pulls the window back onto its latch. As he does so, a sudden thought occurs to him.

‘Jemma?’

‘Hmm?’ She is washing her hands at the sink, her eyebrows knitted together.

Fitz pushes the window, testing how easily it will swing out. ‘Do you go up to the roof often?’

Jemma wipes her hands on her skirt. She looks a little embarrassed. ‘I wouldn’t say often. Just when I need a moment to myself. Why do you ask?’

‘I…’

Fitz catches himself before he goes too far. Mack’s words ring in his ears: _you can’t make the same mistake twice_. He shakes his head.

‘No reason,’ he says. ‘I was curious, that’s all.’

Jemma looks at him uncertainly for a moment, before nodding and turning around to head back to the office. Fitz follows her, but only after pulling the window tightly shut and making sure that he has heard the lock click.

Jemma watches the clock, tapping her pen against the side of her desk impatiently. Time seems to be moving slower than usual, the minute hand dragging its feet, the clock unwilling to reach half part five and set her free. Wiggling her fingers, Jemma leans back in her chair to wait.

It has been two weeks since Fitz started as her bodyguard, and the two of them have fallen into a routine that, if not yet comfortable, is certainly manageable. Fitz will leave the building with the other employees at the end of the day then circle back around to wait for her by the car. Once the coast is clear, Jemma will join him and he will drive her home. Neither of them ever say much during the drive. For the past week, all Jemma has been able to do is stare at her feet.

Their encounter on the roof had felt like something of a wakeup call. She’d seen real fear in Fitz’s face as he’d told her off and it had startled her. Later, her surprise had turned to shame as she realised he’d been right. She’d tossed and turned all night, running their conversation back in her head, unable to believe how selfish she’d been. Protecting her was his _job_ , and all she’d done since he’d arrived was make it difficult for him to do it. It shocks her that she hadn’t recognised this earlier.

Since then, she has tried to find little ways to make it easier for Fitz at Flare. In the mornings, she waits by the front door of her apartment block so that she can come down to the car as soon as she sees him approach. She asks catering to leave a fresh cup of tea and a pastry in her office every morning, which she sneaks out to his desk before he finishes his brief with Elena. She spends a large part of the afternoon trying to think up a question to ask him as they drive home, hoping to hit upon the right one to spark a conversation. There is a list in the top drawer of her desk with five failed questions crossed out.

Not that Fitz has shown even an ounce of gratitude for all this. He still sends her his usual _outside_ text. He drinks the tea and puts the pastry wrapper in the recycling bin, but doesn’t once inquires where it had come from. Whenever she tries to talk to him, he clams up, reverting to monosyllabic answers and nods or shakes of the head. Jemma hasn’t heard him string together a full sentence since the day on the roof.

It is, of course, not a part of his job description to like her. But, as the week has gone on and Fitz seems so stubbornly set on not talking to her, Jemma finds herself wishing more and more that he would.

Sighing, she glances up at the clock and sees with a start that it has passed five thirty and she is late. Pushing her chair back from her desk, Jemma grabs her bag from the floor and hurries out of the office, her heart in her mouth. Not only does she wish that Fitz would like her, tonight it would be incredibly useful if he did.

By the time she reaches the car park, it is a quarter to six. Fitz is waiting for her beside the car, worry lines etched deep into his forehead. As she approaches him, these clear and he stands up straighter, pushing himself off the car to open the back door for her.

Jemma offers him a quick, nervous smile. ‘Thank you, Fitz.’

He merely nods in response before climbing into the driver’s seat. ‘Home, then,’ he says, unquestioningly.

‘Um.’ Jemma folds her hands in her lap. ‘Actually, no.’

Instantly, Fitz swivels in his seat to stare at her. ‘No? Why not? Has something happened? Has there been another threat?’ Alarm is written all over his face.

‘No! No, definitely not.’ Jemma shakes her head. Looking up, she can see the concern in his eyes and it makes her mouth feel inexplicably dry. She licks her lips. ‘But the thing is, Fitz, I’ve done something rather stupid. I meant to go down to the supermarket on Sunday to get groceries, but I got distracted by the schematics for the new laptop model. By the time I realised, it was late and everywhere was shut. I’ve got nothing to eat tonight but a few old teabags.’

Fitz is staring at her, his brain seemingly still processing the fact that there was no immediate threat to her safety. Jemma sighs.

‘I need you to take me to the supermarket before you take me home.’

‘Oh.’ Fitz blinks. ‘Is that all?’

He sounds almost disappointed. Jemma sinks back into her seat.

‘Yes,’ she says wearily. ‘That’s all.’

They drive to the supermarket in awkward silence. Once they are inside, Jemma takes up a basket and begins to move down the fresh fruit aisle. She is in search of the best looking apples when she realises Fitz, who had entered the store beside her, has fallen behind. Frowning, she looks up.

Fitz is standing a good fifteen feet away from her, still at the bottom of the aisle. He is absently fiddling with a bag of oranges but he is clearly distracted. When Jemma takes a step up the aisle, he does too. A woman standing behind him notices, and her eyes narrow suspiciously.

Jemma rolls her eyes. Hoisting her basket onto her arm, she hurries back down the aisle to him.

‘Fitz,’ she says, dropping her voice to a murmur. ‘You can’t tail me in here.’

He frowns. ‘Why not? It’s the safest way to keep an eye on you by keeping my distance.’

‘That’s the thing. I don’t think you can keep your distance in this situation.’ Jemma nods over her shoulder to where the woman is still watching them. ‘It looks like you’re _stalking_ me.’

Fitz follows her gaze and his eyes widen. ‘Oh. Right.’ His cheeks redden. ‘I see.’

Jemma shifts from one foot to the other. ‘What do we do now?’

‘There’s only one thing for it, I suppose.’ Fitz sucks in a deep breath and reaches out to take the basket from her arm. His fingers, as they pass over hers, are pleasantly warm. ‘We’ll have to shop together.’

When he steps forward towards the vegetables, Jemma follows.

At first, she tries to be as quick as possible, grabbing whatever came to hand and not even bothering to check the best-before dates. But, as they pass the fresh produce and head into the other aisles, she starts to slow. Fitz is patient, never checking his watch or hurrying her on. Before long, Jemma is pulling him to a stop to test the softness of the bread and reach behind the milk bottles for the longest date. He doesn’t even blink when she runs back to swap the cabbage she hadn’t wanted for the kale that she did.

It’s the most comfortable she’s felt with him since that first day in her office. She wonders whether he feels the same way.

It is because of this feeling of comfort that, when they reach the queue for the cashier’s desk, Jemma finds the courage to say something she’s been meaning to all week.

‘By the way,’ she says, feeling her cheeks warm despite the chill of the shop, ‘I never apologised for running off the other day.’

Fitz shakes his head. He is still carrying the basket, passing it from one hand to the other to balance the weight. ‘You don’t need to apologise for that.’

‘Of course I do!’ Jemma sidesteps a hanging display of chocolate as they move forward in the line. ‘You were right. I should have told you where I was going. It was unfair of me to leave you in the lurch like that. I wasn’t thinking about how you’d feel not knowing where I was.’

‘You were upset,’ Fitz reasons. ‘I’d have done the same thing in your position.’

‘That’s not a good enough excuse.’

As if they’ve both agreed on it, they stop and turn to each other. Looking up, Jemma can tell that Fitz is growing uncomfortable, that his earlier ease in her presence is slipping away like sand in an hourglass. She sighs.

‘I’m sorry that I made things difficult for you. That’s all. I suppose I’ve been so wrapped up in how inconvenient this is for me, I’d forgotten that this is – that _I am_ – your job.’

All of a sudden, Fitz stops. He blinks, slowly, then looks at her again. He seems to regard her with a new curiosity, as though there is a puzzle between them that he can’t quite figure out. The scrutiny of his gaze makes Jemma’s cheeks feel warm once again. She flushes, tilting her head to one side.

‘What is it?’

Fitz shakes his head again. ‘Oh, nothing. It’s just…what you said, I…’

Behind them, someone clears their throat, making them both jump. Turning around, Jemma sees that the cashier is tapping her fingernails on the conveyor belt, waiting impatiently for them to place their basket on it.

‘I think it’s our turn,’ Fitz says helpfully.

The drive back to Jemma’s apartment is also conducted in silence, although it is a far more comfortable one than before. Sitting in the back, Jemma takes the opportunity to stare at the back of Fitz’s head as he drives. She finds herself wishing she could reach across and delve into his mind, following his train of thoughts until she found the one the cashier had interrupted. In her head, she is able to extract it and unravel it like a glittering spool of thread in the back of the car. She will hold it in her hands and it will be the key she has been missing to help them turn the corner.

When they reach her apartment, Fitz jumps out of the car. For the first time, he walks her up the steps to the foyer, carrying a bag of groceries in each hand. He sets them down at her feet once they are inside and rubs his hands together.

‘Do you need help carrying them upstairs?’

Jemma would dearly love to say yes, just to spend just a few more minutes with him and have him look at her the way he had in the supermarket again. But it is quite clear that she can manage the bags by herself, so she shakes her head.

‘No, thank you. I’ll be alright now.’

Fitz nods. ‘Okay. I’ll see you in the morning, then.’

He turns, as if to go back down to the car, and then hesitates. Jemma feels her heart lift as he looks back at her.

‘I’m sorry too,’ he says. ‘I shouldn’t have yelled at you on the roof the way that I did. I, ah…didn’t go about it in the most delicate of ways.’

The corners of Jemma’s mouth twitch. ‘No,’ she agrees, ‘you didn’t. But I think it was justified.’

Fitz shrugs. ‘All the same,’ he says, ‘I feel badly about it. I’m sorry.’

His words feel genuine, filled with an earnestness of spirit that Jemma can see reflected in his eyes as they gaze down at her. Suddenly, it is all she can do to smile.

‘In which case,’ she says softly, ‘I think we’re both forgiven.’

She steps forward, and offers Fitz her hand. He takes it with a smile that feels like the sun coming out and gives it a gentle shake.

Instead of heading straight for the lift with her grocery bags, Jemma lingers in the foyer. She stands watching as Fitz heads back down the stairs and climbs back into her car. As he drives away, she smiles to herself, her hand still pulsing where the warmth of his palm had pressed against it.

They may not have turned it yet, but Jemma has a suspicion that the all-important corner is, at least, in sight.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "When she’d reached over, all she’d thought she might do was tap him on the arm but somehow the closer she’d got the more natural it had felt to slip her fingers between his own. Jemma thinks that it might have been because of the dark. Things that happen in the dark feel less real than those that happen in daylight.
> 
> Jemma is still thinking about this as she opens her office door and steps inside. Her office is lit by the same golden haze as the rest of the building but there is a glow from a streetlamp shining in through her window that forces her to blink. Once her eyes have adjusted to the light, she sees something that makes her breath catch in her throat.
> 
> Standing beside her desk is a figure dressed all in black with a mask covering their face so that their features are hidden. They are hovering over her computer and there is a glint of silver as they push something small and shiny into their pocket which might have been a hard drive, but Jemma isn’t looking close enough to see. 
> 
> A cold clarity falls over her body as the figure’s head moves upwards and she realises she will need to move fast if she wants to get away with her life."
> 
> Late night drives bys and death defying acts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you guys for sticking with this story! hope you're enjoying it so far and that you're all staying smart during this difficult time for the world 💛

The chairs in the waiting room at the office of Bobbi Morse, lawyer to Flare Industries, are incredibly slippery. Sitting in one, Fitz can feel himself sliding further and further down the leather and he has to keep standing up to sit back down again securely. Pressing his shoulders firmly against the plush back of the seat, he plants his feet on the floor and fixes his eyes on the door in front of him.

It has been almost an hour since Daisy and Jemma had disappeared inside with their lawyer. The request for a meeting had arrived in Jemma’s inbox just after lunch and she’d called him into her office to explain that they’d have to go via Bobbi’s on their way back to hers that night.

‘I’m so sorry, Fitz,’ she’d said, her nose wrinkling up apologetically. ‘I know it’s been a long week and you must have been looking forward to getting away from us all for a few days.’

Fitz had stumbled back to his intern’s desk wondering if this was true.

He makes the mistake of moving a fraction of an inch and finds himself all but sliding straight off the leather. Irritated, Fitz decides to give up on leaning back in the chair altogether and instead sits forward on the edge of the seat, his elbows resting on his knees.

Inside Bobbi’s office, he can hear a medley of voices. It isn’t hard for him to identify Jemma’s. Whenever he hears her speak, he finds himself straining even harder to listen to what they are saying. But even then the door muffles their words too much and he is still none the wiser as to what is being discussed.

Dropping his chin into his hand, Fitz finds himself thinking back to what Jemma had said earlier. _You must have been looking forward to getting away from us all for a few days_. She had said _us_ but Fitz was fairly certain she had meant _me_.

In a way, he had to admit that she was right. The monotony of his days at Flare really take it out of him, their sameness driving him mad. Add to that the pressure of secrecy surrounding his role there, and the early starts, and by Fridays he is desperate to get home and collapse on the couch and think about no one but himself for two whole days.

And yet.

And yet, Fitz spends every weekend feeling restless. He stares out the window, trying to figure out if he can see Jemma’s apartment block from his own. He pores over a half-written text, his thumb hovering over the keyboard, before dropping his phone on the bed and rolling away from it. He wakes in the middle of the night to stare into the darkness and wonder if she is doing the same thing.

The agitation doesn’t stop until Monday rolls around again and Jemma is climbing into the backseat of the car with a smile and a ‘good morning’ meant just for him.

Fitz knows that this is a dangerous way to feel. But, unfortunately, he also knows that it’s about as unstoppable as his bum is on Bobbi’s leather chairs.

It is approaching eight o’clock when the office door finally opens and Bobbi, Daisy and Jemma come out. Fitz jumps to his feet but stays a respectful distance away as they say their goodbyes. Bobbi touches both of them on the shoulder before disappearing down the corridor, her absurdly high heels marching purposefully down the carpet.

Daisy and Jemma turn to each other and Fitz is mildly alarmed by the look of worry written across Daisy’s face. He steps forward, coming up to stand behind them just as Daisy speaks.

‘We’ll deal with this,’ she says, sounding more convinced than she looks.

Jemma nods, but Fitz can tell with a single glance at her that she is significantly upset. ‘Of course.’

‘Just get home safe,’ Daisy says, shooting a look over at Fitz, ‘and try…try not to think about it.’

Jemma snorts, softly, bitterly. ‘How can I not?’

She gives Daisy’s hand a fleeting squeeze, then turns to Fitz.

‘Ready to go?’

Fitz nods.

‘Yeah. Always.’

The traffic through the city is heavy at this time of night. Fitz does his best, weaving in and out of the busiest lanes and recalculating his route several times, but it is still taking them far longer than usual to reach Jemma’s apartment.

He leans over the back of his seat to tell her this but it is clear Jemma isn’t listening. In her lap, her fingers are fidgeting, chipping at her nail polish and rubbing her watch strap against her wrist.

Swallowing hard, Fitz turns back to the road and tries to concentrate on his driving. But, in spite of himself, he finds his eyes lifting to the rear view mirror again and again and eventually he can’t help himself.

He clears his throat. ‘Uh, Jemma? Is everything okay?’

‘Hmm?’ She blinks distractedly. ‘Oh, yes. Fine.’

Fitz tries not to feel hurt by how curtly she delivers the lie. She hasn’t been this abrupt with him for weeks, not since the roof incident. He knows that it is unfair of him to like her better when she is kind to him, given that he himself still keeps as much distance between them as he can outwardly, but still.

He tries again.

‘Did anything happen in the meeting that I need to know about? Anything…anything I need to know for my job?’

‘Oh, no.’ Jemma shakes her head. She bites at a hangnail on her little finger. ‘No.’

There is a pause and they both fall quiet. Fitz pulls the car into the left hand lane. Jemma stares out of the window.

‘Daisy received another letter,’ she says evenly.

Fitz’s heart skips a beat. He manages to keep the car on the road but his grip on the steering wheel tightens. ‘Like the ones from before?’ he asks.

‘It’s threatening,’ Jemma clarifies, ‘yes.’ There is a beat before she adds, ‘whoever wrote it claims they know who the witness is.’

Fitz’s mind is already ticking with the possibilities. The letter-writer could be bluffing. Maybe they are hoping that by scaring Daisy enough she will accidentally out the witness by trying to warn them. Alternatively, they might think they know but are wrong. Or, most horribly of all, they have identified the right person and Jemma is in more danger now than she has ever been before.

Just as these thoughts are making their way through Fitz’s head, Jemma suddenly sits bolt upright on the back seat. She grabs her bag and begins to rummage through it, throwing her laptop and purse onto the seats in a way very unlike her.

Fitz is just about to ask her again if something is wrong when she looks up and meets his gaze in the rear view mirror.

‘Fitz,’ she says, ‘Fitz, I’m so sorry but we need to go back to Flare.’

‘We have to _what_?’

Fitz shakes his head in disbelief. They are ten minutes away from Jemma’s apartment. It will take them an hour to get back to Flare, then another hour to get home again. By this rate, they’ll still be driving when it hits midnight.

‘I know,’ Jemma moans. ‘I know and I’m sorry. But I’ve left the new specifications for the Sunburst Laptop on my desk. I promised Allen and Rose that I’d get it back to them on Monday morning. We have to go back and get it.’

‘Jemma,’ Fitz says desperately, ‘I really don’t think it’s a good idea. You heard what Daisy said. She needs you to get home safely.’

‘That may be so, but _I_ need those specifications. Tonight.’

There is determination in her voice, and a single-mindedness that scares Fitz. As much as he hates the idea of taking her back to Flare this late at night, when the building is empty and the lights are off, he has a suspicion that even if he refused she’d find a way to go back without him anyway. And if she is going back there tonight, he’s going to go with her.

When they reach the next roundabout, Fitz drives them all the way around it to head back the way they’d come.

Flare looks even more imposing at night than it does in the day. There is a curious yellow hum to the building that Fitz knows belongs to the new security system. If any of the doors or windows are breached by someone without the proper security clearance, the glow turns red and an alert is sent to Daisy and the police.

As soon as they pull up outside the front doors, Jemma is out of the car. Fitz scrambles to catch up to her as she strides to the security panel outside and touches her card to it. As she does so, she frowns.

‘That’s odd.’

‘What?’ Fitz glances at her, before looking up to scan the empty car park in case they were being watched. ‘What’s odd?’

‘The door was already open,’ Jemma says, her eyebrows furrowing as she pushes the front doors. They yield easily for her, revealing Flare’s darkened foyer beyond. ‘How strange.’

Fitz feels a prickling at the back of his neck.

‘I don’t like this,’ he says. ‘Jemma, I think we should go.’

He watches her hesitate, biting down on her lower lip. Then, making her decision, she shakes her head.

‘No. We’ve come all this way. And besides,’ she adds, almost to herself, ‘no one could get in without their security pass. No one.’

Fitz watches her take a deep breath before stepping over the boundary and into the lobby. Almost as soon as she has done it, she lets out a short, relieved laugh.

‘Oh! It’s alright, Fitz. It’s just Elena, look. She must have come back to work late on something.’

She points and, sure enough, the light is on in Elena’s office, the place where she monitored all the cameras in the building and ran the main security system. The tightness in Fitz’s chest eases slightly but he can still feel an uneasiness swirling in his stomach. He steps into the lobby after Jemma.

‘Maybe I should go and let her know we’re here?’ he suggests to her. ‘She might want to come with us.’

Jemma shakes her head. ‘Oh no, let’s let her work. She’s had so much to do lately.’

Fitz is about to protest, even lift his voice to call out to Elena, but then Jemma does something that silences him, quite possibly forever. She takes hold of his hand.

‘Come on,’ she whispers.

Her fingers slip to his wrist as they hurry up the stairs, but Fitz can feel them as if they were still twinned with his own. Her palm had been warm and soft. It had been nice. He tries to shake off the phantom fingers and concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other.

When they reach the prototype floor, Jemma lets go of him altogether. Even under the dim yellow light, Fitz can see spots of colour on her cheeks.

‘I’ll wait here,’ he says. ‘Just in case Elena comes up and sees the door open.’

Jemma nods. ‘Alright. I won’t be long, it’s just on my desk.’

She gives him a fleeting smile before pushing the large glass door open. Fitz watches as she crosses the floor to her office and slips inside.

Almost immediately, there is a muffled thump. Inhaling sharply, Fitz rushes forward then stops.

‘Jemma?’ he calls.

When there is no answer, his hand goes instinctively to his side where he discovers he has left his SHIELD-registered gun in the side compartment of the car. Mentally cursing himself, Fitz takes another step forward.

He almost calls again, but there has been no further noise from the office. Maybe Jemma hadn’t left the specs on her desk after all and the thump had just been her opening a drawer to look for them. Any moment now she will re-emerge with them in hand and they will call goodnight to Elena as they leave for home. Fitz waits for this to happen.

It doesn’t.

Instead, he hears Jemma scream his name.

As Jemma hurries across the prototype floor to her office she isn’t thinking about the Sunburst specifications on her desk. Rather, she is thinking about how she had grabbed Fitz’s hand to lead him upstairs.

She hadn’t planned on doing it. When she’d reached over, all she’d thought she might do was tap him on the arm but somehow the closer she’d got the more natural it had felt to slip her fingers between his own. Jemma thinks that it might have been because of the dark. Things that happen in the dark feel less real than those that happen in daylight.

Jemma is still thinking about this as she opens her office door and steps inside. Her office is lit by the same golden haze as the rest of the building but there is a glow from a streetlamp shining in through her window that forces her to blink. Once her eyes have adjusted to the light, she sees something that makes her breath catch in her throat.

Standing beside her desk is a figure dressed all in black with a mask covering their face so that their features are hidden. They are hovering over her computer and there is a glint of silver as they push something small and shiny into their pocket which might have been a hard drive, but Jemma isn’t looking close enough to see.

A cold clarity falls over her body as the figure’s head moves upwards and she realises she will need to move fast if she wants to get away with her life.

She steps backwards, one hand already reaching for the door handle, but the figure in black is far quicker. Darting across the room, they grab her by the shoulder of her jacket and throw her against the desk.

Jemma means to cry out, but her side hits the sharp corner of the desk and winds her. She falls to the ground gasping and tries to grab at the carpet to pull herself up but her head is spinning too hard for her to get a good grip.

The figure pins her to the floor, their knee pressed on her chest, and their hands come up to squeeze at her throat. Terrified, Jemma writhes on her back, her arms flailing uselessly as she tries to push them away, tries to break herself free. Her chest is growing tight and spots start to dance before her eyes.

All of a sudden, Jemma sees herself from outside of her body. Or, to be precise, she sees herself lying on the floor outside her office with three bullet wounds in her side. Then, she is crouching on the ground with her eye to the door, watching Lucas James bleed to death while a man with a gun stands above him. The man turns but Jemma can’t see his face anymore. It is shrouded in black.

Tears spring to Jemma’s eyes. She isn’t going to die like this. She isn’t going to die before she has gotten justice for Lucas.

Mustering up all the strength that she can, she pulls one of her legs up underneath her attacker and knees them as hard as she can in the groin. She can’t have hurt them very much at all, but her action is unexpected enough for them to start a little and, most vitally, to slacken their grip on her neck.

Jemma gasps for breath before lifting her voice as high as she can to yell: ‘Fitz!’

As soon as his name has left her lips, her attacker snaps back to her, covering her mouth and nose with their gloved hand and pressing down with intent. A sudden lick of fury leaps at Jemma’s insides and she sinks her teeth into the musty leather of their glove, biting so hard she tastes bitter blood.

The hand jerks away from her mouth, just as the office door flies open and Fitz enters the room. It takes him a single stride to reach her, to grab her assailant by the shoulder, and to rip them away from her.

Jemma’s lungs are screaming as she scrambles away from them both, crawling under her desk to keep out of the way. She flinches as Fitz throws the attacker against the office wall, making the floor shake beneath her. He makes a grab for the figure’s mask but is stopped by a firm hand that bends his wrist back so far Jemma is afraid it will snap.

Fitz yelps and kicks out clumsily, but it is clear the attacker now has the upper hand. He pushes Fitz backwards, past Jemma’s hiding place, to slam him against the opposite wall.

Panic begins to rise in Jemma’s chest, her blood pulsing through her limbs. She needs to help him.

Struggling to her feet, she gropes about on her desk for something that could help. Her fingers close with relish around a heavy glass paperweight with pink peonies preserved inside that Daisy had given her several Christmases ago. Jemma steps forward before she can think too much about what she is about to do. Lifting the paperweight high above her head, she strikes it hard against the base of the attacker’s skull.

They cry out in pain, instantly letting go of Fitz’s wrist and dropping him to the floor. Jemma jerks her hand back as they stumble backwards towards her, the paperweight slipping from her fingers. The figure shoves her roughly in their disorientation, pushing her away so that she trips over it. She falls, just as the figure manages to stagger to the doorway. Through her hazy vision, Jemma sees them pause for a moment to look back at them both. And then, they are gone.

She tries to exhale, but it comes out as a sob. Across the room there is movement, and the next thing she knows Fitz is by her side, touching her gently on the shoulder.

‘Hey. Hey, Jemma. Are you alright? Did they hurt you?’

Jemma shakes her head, still gulping down deep breaths, but the light from the window must have fallen exactly right on her neck to show Fitz the red marks where she’d been strangled. His eyes grow dark, and he presses his thumb to them in a way that makes her shiver. Instantly, he retracts, looking guilty.

He hadn’t hurt her, not in the slightest, and Jemma reaches out to reassure him.

‘I’m alright,’ she says, hoarsely. She is still trembling, but tries to keep her hand steady as she rests it on his. ‘I’m alright. But we…we need to get out of here.’

Fitz nods, a deep frown etched on his forehead. ‘Yeah, we do. But we can’t go out the main door. They might be waiting for us there.’

At the thought of meeting the masked figure again, Jemma shivers. Fitz is right – they need another exit plan. She thinks for a moment, biting her lip.

‘Daisy’s office,’ she says. ‘There’s a fire escape outside the window that leads around the back of the building to the recycling bins. It’ll be a soft landing and then we can escape to the car.’

She watches Fitz think this through, his frown deepening as he runs the logistics in his head. Jemma can read him well enough now to know that he is trying to think of a safer way to get her out. She also knows that he is coming up empty.

‘Okay,’ he says after a while, nodding slowly. ‘Okay. But we have to move fast. If we start taking too long, they could come back for us.’

Eager to avoid this, Jemma returns his nod and gets to her feet. Her legs feel a little wobbly, but she plants them firmly on the floor as she turns to pick the paperweight up again. Fitz eyes it with an unconvinced air.

‘Really?’

Jemma rolls her eyes as she slips it into her pocket. ‘It worked well enough the last time.’

Fitz looks as if he might argue, then thinks better of it. With a deep sigh, he ushers her behind him then cautiously opens the door.

They take the service stairs down to Daisy’s office, just in case the figure in black is still lurking on the main staircase. Jemma can feel her heart pound in time with her feet as she takes the steps two at a time. When they reach Daisy’s door, she keeps her access card in her pocket and starts to type a code into the keypad instead.

‘Manual override,’ she explains in a whisper. ‘If whoever attacked us is still in Elena’s office, they’d be able to see where we are if I used my card to get us in.’

She looks up, just in time to see a flash of admiration cross Fitz’s face.

‘Good thinking.’

No sooner than they are inside the room, however, a sharp slam can be heard out in the corridor. Jemma’s head snaps up at the same time as Fitz’s and they stare at each other as the sound of footsteps grows louder and louder.

Fitz moves first, hurrying to the window to unfasten the latch.

‘We need to go,’ he says, pushing the window up. ‘Now.’

Jemma feels her stomach lurch, and she nods in agreement. She is just about to move to stand beside him at the window when some papers on Daisy’s desk catches her eye.

‘Jemma,’ Fitz says, already half-way out to the fire escape. Jemma can hear the urgency in his voice. ‘Let’s _go_.’

Outside, the footsteps have sped up and are getting louder. Jemma swallows hard and makes a grab for the papers, stuffing them inside her jacket for safety as she follows Fitz out of the window and onto the metal balcony of the fire escape.

They are just in time. As soon as they turn the corner of the building towards the ladder there is a smashing of glass and Fitz takes hold of Jemma’s hand.

‘Run!’ he yells.

Jemma’s fingers shake as she climbs down the ladder, her feet slipping off the rungs more than once in her haste to get down. The jump onto the top of the recycling bin jars her ankles, but she barely notices. She is too consumed by fear of the clanging of metal above them.

Fitz jumps down from the bin and holds his arms up to her. The glow of the streetlamp above them illuminates his features, showing Jemma that he is just as afraid as she is. She grips his forearms and pushes herself off the bin, letting him lift her carefully to the floor.

They run, feet slapping against the concrete, to the car. Fitz climbs into the driver’s seat and Jemma throws herself into the passenger door beside him. As the car screeches away from the building, she twists around, heart thumping, to peer out of the rear window.

Standing on the pavement they’d just left is the figure in black. They reach up to pull off their mask and Jemma strains forward, trying to make out their face. But she is too far away and the light is wrong and suddenly Fitz is turning the corner and she can see the figure no more.

Jemma falls back into her seat and closes her eyes, unable to stop herself from imagining them stepping into the shadows, ready to jump back out at her when she was least expecting. Tears well up behind her closed eyelids and she finds that she is powerless to stop them.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 'Jemma doesn’t realise Fitz is hurt until they are all the way across town.
> 
> His driving is slapdash, the car skidding over the road markings and breaking roughly at red lights, but she assumes this is a result of high adrenaline and says nothing. In any case, her own heart is still hammering hard against her ribcage, making her skittish and distracted. Plus, she is sitting up front with him instead of in the backseat, which she has never done before. It makes her painfully aware of his presence all while trying not to be.'
> 
> Hurt hands and healed hearts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you so much for your lovely comments! i hope you enjoy this chapter.

Jemma doesn’t realise Fitz is hurt until they are all the way across town.

His driving is slapdash, the car skidding over the road markings and breaking roughly at red lights, but she assumes this is a result of high adrenaline and says nothing. In any case, her own heart is still hammering hard against her ribcage, making her skittish and distracted. Plus, she is sitting up front with him instead of in the backseat, which she has never done before. It makes her painfully aware of his presence all while trying not to be.

They never discuss out loud where they are driving to. But, as if they have made some unspoken agreement, Fitz takes the usual turnings until Jemma understands that they are going home. The tightness in her chest loosens, just a little.

The digital clock on the car dashboard reads 00:01 as Fitz pulls up outside her apartment block. He takes the keys out of the ignition and the car judders to a stop. The ensuing silence, punctuated only by their shaky breathing, is deafening and Jemma is suddenly desperate to do something to break it. She turns to Fitz, only to widen her eyes.

‘Your hand!’

Fitz had been trying unsuccessfully to hide his hand beneath the steering wheel. At the sound of her voice, he stops and looks up at her guiltily. Slowly, he lifts it back up. There is significant swelling about his wrist and Jemma can see the beginning imprint of bruises along his fingers. Before she can stop herself, she is reaching out to touch them.

‘It must have happened when they bent my wrist back,’ Fitz says with a wince. He flexes his fingers gingerly before adding, ‘of course, I barely felt it at the time.’

Jemma, who distinctly remembers him crying out when it had happened, tactfully stays quiet. She prods gently at his wrist. Although he has no broken bones, the swelling concerns her. He needs medical attention, and he needs it tonight.

She glances up at him. Fitz’s face is pale beneath the harsh glow of the streetlights and there are dark circles under his eyes. She remembers how quickly he had come to her call and how he hadn’t thought twice about putting himself between her and their attacker.

Swallowing hard, Jemma reaches into the backseat for her keys.

‘Come on,’ she says softly. ‘Let’s go inside.’

The night security at the front desk barely raise their heads as Fitz and Jemma pass them on the way to the elevators. As the sleek doors close behind them, Jemma exhales a sigh of relief. If they had been stopped, it would have been difficult to explain the red marks on her neck, or the way Fitz was cradling his arm to his chest.

Once they are safely inside her flat, she directs Fitz to a sofa and sits him down.

‘Wait here.’

Fitz doesn’t look like he’ll have much trouble obeying this instruction. Since they’d left the car, all his energy seems to have ebbed away. It was like he had used up all his remaining strength to get them home safely. He’d done his part, Jemma thinks. Now, it was her turn.

Her first stop is the bathroom, where she raids her first aid kit for a bandage and the strongest painkillers she can find. Then, she heads to the kitchen to wrap some ice in a tea towel and fish an old washing up bowl out from under the sink. All these things she carries back to the living area after tucking a bottle of cold water beneath her arm.

Fitz is still slumped on the sofa, looking slightly grey. He lifts his head as she approaches, though, and tries to look a little more alert. It makes Jemma’s heart twinge, unexpectedly.

She sits down beside him and gestures for his injured hand. Fitz offers it to her, then hisses as she presses the ice against it.

‘Ow! That’s _cold_!’

Jemma rolls her eyes. ‘Of course it’s cold. It’s _ice_. We need to bring down your swelling or it will just hurt even more.’

Fitz pulls a face, but takes the ice pack from her to hold it against his wrist anyway. Satisfied, Jemma slides the washing up bowl onto his lap to catch the water as it melted and sets the painkillers and water down on the coffee table. She cocks her head at him.

‘Feeling any better?’

Fitz exhales, slowly. ‘Yeah, a little bit.’ He pauses. ‘Thank you.’

A little flicker of warmth sparks in Jemma’s chest as they share a smile.

Sucking in a breath, Fitz breaks away from her gaze to look about the room. ‘You know, every time I’ve waited for you outside…I never imagined your home looking like this.’

Jemma frowns. ‘What do you mean by that?’

When she’d first moved into her apartment, the flat had been a complete blank canvas. She’d been able to decorate it however she wanted and over the years she’d been able to curate it into her perfect home.

The large open plan living area was sunken slightly into the floor, with three large cranberry coloured sofas gathered around a beautifully crafted coffee table. The living area led into the kitchen, with its cheery saffron and turquoise tiles she’d had imported from Morocco, and the breakfast bar next to the window where she could look out over the city lights.

The view out of that window was almost Jemma’s favourite part of her home, second only to the floor to ceiling bookshelves that lined every wall, and were crammed with books on every subject and in every language that she had ever found herself interested in. It was her own personal library, and Jemma liked to think of it as a collage of memories. Each book reminded her of a different moment in her life, one she could return to with the flick of a page.

‘I don’t mean anything bad,’ Fitz says. A dribble of water leaks out of his tea towel as he moves his ice pack around his wrist. ‘Just that, from the outside looking in, you expect the apartments in this place to look different to this.’

‘In what way?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Sleeker. Look, but don’t touch. More luxurious, I guess.’

Jemma bristles slightly. ‘So, you think my home isn’t _luxurious_ enough? And it should be, because I’m rich?’

‘No!’ Fitz shakes his head with a sigh. ‘No, that’s not what I think. And it’s not what I mean, either.’ He shrugs. ‘I just…All those times I’ve looked up at your apartment, thinking about what it might be like inside, I never imagined it feeling so comfortable. So warm. That’s all.’

It is such a candid answer that it makes Jemma fall silent. She thinks for a moment before saying, quietly, ‘I suppose we always assume a person’s home to be a reflection of themselves.’

She looks up just in time to watch Fitz’s throat bob as he ducks his head. ‘Yeah, well,’ he says, ‘I’m big enough to admit that my assumptions aren’t always correct.’

In spite of herself, Jemma grins.

‘Yes,’ she agrees. ‘I am too.’

The washing up bowl on Fitz’s lap is filling more and more rapidly with water. Gently, Jemma unwraps the tea towel from his wrist, allowing the last of the half-melted ice cubes to fall into the bowl with satisfying _plop_ s. She stands.

‘We’ll ice it again later,’ she decides, as Fitz carefully extends his fingers into the bandage, securing it around his wrist. ‘But for now, you should take some medication and get some rest.’

‘Yeah.’ Fitz gives a wistful sigh. ‘Resting sounds pretty good right now.’

Jemma nods, and is just about to reach for the pills on the table when a touch to her elbow stops her. She looks up in surprise to find Fitz’s hand receding as he sinks back into the cushions.

‘Before I do, though…I feel like I owe you an explanation.’

Jemma blinks. ‘An explanation for what?’

‘For…well, for myself, I suppose.’ With his uninjured hand, Fitz runs his hand through his hair. ‘I know that I’ve been pretty cold towards you. And you haven’t deserved that.’

‘Oh.’

Whatever Jemma had expected him to say, it certainly hadn’t been that. She sets the washing up bowl down on the table and sits back beside him. Their shoulders brush, unobtrusively.

‘I wouldn’t say you’ve been cold, exactly,’ she says carefully. ‘You’ve been doing your job. And it’s not as if I’ve been particularly _warm_ , either.’

‘No,’ Fitz concedes. ‘But you’ve been trying, especially lately, and I’ve not been very responsive.’

‘You haven’t needed to be,’ Jemma whispers.

‘But,’ Fitz says with a shaky sigh, ‘I’ve _wanted_ to be.’

Puzzled, Jemma twists on the sofa so that she is facing him. She can see that some colour has returned to his cheeks, flushing them pink. He turns towards her, and the earnestness in his face takes her quite by surprise. She has to suck in a deep breath before she can remember what had just been said.

‘How do you mean?’

Fitz’s gaze falls to his hands lying in his lap, the bandaged one covering the other. He opens them.

‘My last job…didn’t end well. I was working for a state senator, as her son’s protection officer. Jacob, he was called. There’d been some threats against him, she was scared. I was with him twenty four seven for about three months.’

Jemma fights back the urge to raise an eyebrow. She’d slowly come to understand just how experienced Fitz was, but she’d never imagined him working such a high profile job before.

‘He was a good kid,’ Fitz continues, ‘smart, sociable. His family’s circumstances had left him pretty lonely though, so I think he was almost happy I was there. We became friends. Then, one day, he told me he thought he knew who was making the threats against him. He’d overheard one of his mum’s aides on the phone and got suspicious. He asked me to help him figure it out and I…I agreed.’

He falls silent. Biting her lip, Jemma waits for him to start again.

‘I pulled some strings,’ Fitz says after a moment or two. ‘Started to investigate the aide. But in doing so, I lost focus on what was most important.’ He swallows, hard. ‘I was late picking him up from his hockey game. And someone else got there before me.’

Fleetingly, Jemma closes her eyes. She can only imagine the panic he must have felt in that moment. How frantic he must have been. She remembers with a flicker of guilt how angry he’d been with her that day on the roof, when she too had disappeared.

‘Fitz,’ she says softly, ‘I’m so sorry.’

He shakes his head. ‘It was awful. His mum was so afraid. I’ve never, ever, felt so sick in all my life.’

Feeling sympathetic tears prick at her eyes, Jemma reaches out. Curling her fingers around his uninjured wrist, she gives a light squeeze. For a heartbeat, Fitz does not respond. Then, he lifts his bandaged hand and rests it on top of her own.

‘Did…’ Jemma starts to ask, then has to start again. ‘Did they find him? Did they find Jacob?’

Fitz lets out a breathy laugh. ‘Yeah. Yeah, thank goodness. He’d been right about the aide all along. I told the police all we’d found out, and he was back with his mum within twenty four hours. But the damage had been done.’

Jemma can imagine. The repercussions with the senator. His relationship with his charge. Mack, and the disappointment he must have felt. Not to mention the effect the experience must have had on Fitz himself. She wonders which damage in particular he is thinking about.

‘When I took this job,’ Fitz says quietly, ‘I promised Mack that I wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.’ He looks up at her. ‘And the longer I’ve spent with you, the more I’ve realised that I _can’t_ make the same mistake twice.’

His eyes are bright and dark and just looking at them makes Jemma feel a pull from somewhere deep down in her belly. She licks her lips to distract herself from it.

‘Fitz,’ she asks, ‘what do you think your mistake was?’

He shrugs dejectedly. ‘Making friends with Jacob, I suppose. If he hadn’t felt like he could talk with me about the aide, if I hadn’t gotten distracted trying to help, he’d never have been taken in the first place. My job is to protect,’ he says fiercely, ‘not to solve. I should have remembered that.’

Jemma is quiet as his words sink in.

‘Perhaps you’re right,’ she says evenly. ‘But, Fitz…if Jacob hadn’t come to talk to you, the truth about the aide might never have come out. He could still have been taken, but no one would have known where to look for him. If it hadn’t been for you, he could still be gone.’

She watches his brow furrows, as he considers what she has said. Encouraged by this, she presses on.

‘I don’t think you were making a mistake when you made friends with Jacob, Fitz. You said he was lonely. He was probably dying for someone to talk to. And then you came along, and you listened to him. I know it might be hard to believe, but you probably helped him more than you hurt him, you know.’

‘Maybe,’ Fitz murmurs. ‘It’s just…difficult to see it that way.’

‘I understand.’ Jemma pauses. ‘What does Mack think? Did he advise you to not become friends with me?’

‘No.’ Fitz frowns, sitting up a little straighter. ‘In fact, he told me that one of the reasons I got this job in the first place is because he thought we’d get on.’ His frown slips, his eyes widening. ‘He…he must have thought it was important that I could be your friend.’

Jemma smiles. ‘I think he was right on both accounts.’

Fitz gives a soft snort as he returns the smile. There is an easiness to it that warms Jemma to her very bones. ‘Yeah. I think he was.’

His hand is still resting on top of hers. Slowly, with a deliberate intent, he turns it so that he can link his fingers with hers and gives them a gentle pump. Unwilling to squeeze back and cause his hand any further hurt, Jemma simply smiles. She hopes that Fitz will read this as her understanding exactly what he is trying to convey.

After a minute or two of companionable silence, she clears her throat.

‘Um, you really ought to take those painkillers now,’ she decides. ‘And then get some rest. It’s pretty late.’

‘Sure,’ Fitz agrees. He takes the pills that she offers to him and washes them down with a few glugs of water. ‘Hey, Jemma?’

Jemma had been tugging an orange stripy throw off of the neighbouring couch. She brings it over to him. ‘Hmm?’

Fitz takes the throw and tucks it around his legs. He hesitates before looking up at her. ‘Thank you.’

All of a sudden, Jemma feels a lump appear in her throat. She looks down at where he has settled himself on her sofa, his socks peeking out from beneath her blanket. It is not a way she has ever expected to see him, and it ought to feel wrong or jarring. She is surprised to find that it doesn’t. Instead, it feels like everything is falling into place.

Jemma nods, managing to smile down at Fitz as he yawns, the painkillers already working their magic.

‘It’s alright,’ she says, then pauses, waiting for his eyes to fall shut before whispering, ‘and thank you too.’

When Fitz wakes up, it takes him a little while to recognise where he is. The cushion behind his head is far plusher than his pillow at home and the ceiling above him is much higher and has significantly fewer cracks.

He stretches, and feels his wrist twinge with unexpected pain. Fitz sucks in a sharp breath as all the events of last night come flooding back.

Struggling into a sitting position, he blinks blearily about Jemma’s front room. All the lights have been dimmed but one, the standing lamp in the kitchen, which is shining a warm yellow glow over the bar stools by the window. Huddled on one of those stools is Jemma, wrapped in a matching blanket to the one Fitz has tangled about his legs. Carefully, he extricates himself and pads across the floor towards her.

‘Jemma?’

He meant to say it gently, so as not to startle her in the middle of the night, but she jumps anyway.

‘Oh! Fitz. I thought you were still sleeping.’

There is something guilty in the way she pulls the papers she’d been reading towards her and covers them with the edge of her blanket.

‘I was.’ Fitz perches on the stool beside her. ‘I, uh, only just woke up.’

‘Oh.’ Jemma nods. Loose tendrils of hair are falling about her face, free of the messy ponytail she’d put up since Fitz had last seen her. ‘Do you want to ice your wrist again?’

Fitz considers this. He tests his wrist out, extending his fingers to see how much they hurt. There is the same twinge he’d experienced on first waking, but other than that only a stiffness. He shakes his head.

‘No, actually. I think it’s okay. The bandage has really helped.’

‘Good. I’m glad.’

Jemma smiles at him, but as she does so she slowly folds her arms to try and sweep what she is hiding from him onto her lap. Fitz raises an eyebrow.

‘Jemma. What have you got?’

She bites her lip then sighs. Pulling the blanket away from the bar, she reveals a stack of thick cardboard sheets pasted with words, each one formed from letters of different size and font. As Fitz leans closer, several of the words jump out at him. _Warning. Trouble. Witness. We know._ He shivers, as the understanding dawns.

‘Where did you…?’

Jemma pulls a face at him. ‘Daisy’s office.’

Fitz remembers her lingering there longer than he’d liked, and how they’d escaped only seconds before the glass had shattered and her attacker had followed them out. He swallows.

‘Why’d you take them?’

‘She’s never let me read any of them,’ Jemma says with a sigh. ‘I suppose I was just curious. But, you know what they say.’ She pushes the pile towards him, an invitation. ‘Curiosity killed the cat.’

Reluctantly, Fitz takes the first letter from the top. He holds it by its edges, unwilling to touch more of it than absolutely necessary, before dropping it onto the bar with distaste. Its author is curt, but he can read hatred in every fragmented phrase of the letter. The sour taste of bile fills his mouth as he reads its threats towards Flare’s witness, what they will do to them if they don’t come forward.

Pushing it aside, Fitz picks up the second letter, then the third. His eyes scan the mismatch fonts and he feels sicker and sicker as he becomes increasingly aware of Jemma sitting quietly beside him. The mere idea of someone wanting to do such horrible things to her makes him shake. It is impossible, he thinks desperately. Unthinkable. How could anyone want to hurt her so badly?

Once he has finished reading every single letter, Fitz gathers them all up and turns them face down. It is a deliberate action, and he sees Jemma’s head rise out of the corner of his eye. She exhales, slowly.

‘They’re quite something, aren’t they?’ she asks. ‘Funnily enough, they look exactly like some that Daisy received, years ago. I tried to hide hers in the vegetable drawer of the fridge.’

She is trying to keep things light, but Fitz can’t do the same. He has read a lot of threatening letters over the years, but he can’t deny that there is something especially malicious about these ones. He wonders if this has anything to do with how certain he is that, given the opportunity, these threats will be fulfilled.

‘They’re disgusting,’ he says. He is filled with a sudden vehemence against their author, which only intensifies as he turns to Jemma and sees the exhaustion in her eyes. ‘They’re awful. I’m so sorry that this is happening to you, Jemma. I really am.’

Jemma reaches out to finger the edges of the cardboard, her eyes glazed over.

‘They don’t care,’ she murmurs, ‘that someone died because of them. All they care about is not getting caught.’

‘But _we_ care,’ Fitz says gently. ‘The police care. They’re going to make sure that whoever is doing this gets brought to justice.’ He takes a deep breath before adding: ‘and I’m going to make sure that nothing happens to you in the meantime.’

Jemma blinks. She looks up at him with watery eyes.

‘Is that a promise?’

Fitz nods. ‘Yes,’ he says firmly. ‘Yes, it absolutely is.’

Fitz isn’t entirely sure how long he sleeps for.

After putting the letters away for the night – Jemma had decided that the vegetable drawer is still the most appropriate place for them – they had both agreed to get a few more hours of rest before the morning. Fitz had pulled his blanket tightly around him and closed his eyes, falling into a deep sleep that is suddenly disturbed by the creak of a floorboard.

He squints through the hazy half-light of the apartment. It is still maybe an hour until dawn.

‘Jemma?’ he croaks.

Jemma is standing at the foot of the sofa in her pyjamas. Her dark hair falls about her face, a frame to the haunted look in her eyes. She is shivering.

‘They were in my office,’ she says, the words tripping off her tongue. ‘They were in my office. They were at my computer. I didn’t put it all together until now, but now that I have, I…’

She breaks off with a gulp. Fitz stares at her, a coldness running down his spine as he realises what she is telling him.

Jemma takes a step towards him, her hands twisting together in agitation.

‘They know,’ she whispers. ‘They know that it was me.’


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 'Jemma had started pulling herself together from the moment Daisy had answered her call. Fitz had watched it happen, seen her begin to reel her fear in as she explained to her friend what had happened the night before. As each new person had been informed, as the knowledge of what had happened to them at Flare started to disperse, she’d collected herself just a little bit more. By the time Officer Nelson and Bobbi had arrived in her apartment, there had been such little trace of the shivering figure she had been just hours ago that Fitz is tempted to second-guess his own memories. He is torn between admiration for Jemma’s self-control and concern over what it is costing her.'
> 
> Packing, plans, and preparation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you so much for all your lovely comments! they really mean a lot to me.
> 
> since it's our first sunday in lockdown, i thought i'd post the next chapter a bit early. just as a bit of a disclaimer, i know absolutely nothing about legalities or trials. if anything in here isn't accurate, it's only for the ease of writing. i hope you enjoy this chapter!

As soon as the sun starts to rise, they call Daisy.

They would have had to anyway, Fitz reasons with himself as he watches Jemma pick up the phone. There was no way she’d never have found out. After all, it was her office that had paid the price for their late-night escape.

Daisy then calls Bobbi and the police officer in charge of Jemma’s case – in that order. Before long, all three parties descend on the apartment and the talking begins.

Officer Nelson reports that a full sweep of Flare’s building had yielded no extraneous fingerprints, which Fitz had fully expected since their attacker had been wearing gloves. He also confirms Jemma’s earlier suspicion: before she’d surprised them, the intruder had accessed private files from her computer and inserted a hard-drive to copy them across. Among those taken were a backlog of her emails, and data from the app Jemma kept her personal agenda on, a digital diary contained every appointment she had from that week until the product launch several months away.

Out of the corner of his eye, Fitz sees Daisy reach across to take Jemma’s hand. He folds his own onto his lap and tries not to look at the girls.

Jemma had started pulling herself together from the moment Daisy had answered her call. Fitz had watched it happen, seen her begin to reel her fear in as she explained to her friend what had happened the night before. As each new person had been informed, as the knowledge of what had happened to them at Flare started to disperse, she’d collected herself just a little bit more. By the time Officer Nelson and Bobbi had arrived in her apartment, there had been such little trace of the shivering figure she had been just hours ago that Fitz is tempted to second-guess his own memories. He is torn between admiration for Jemma’s self-control and concern over what it is costing her.

He is pulled out of his reverie by Bobbi raising her voice.

‘We were assured,’ she says, her hands on her hips, ‘that the threat was still low-level. You told me that yourself when we spoke yesterday after the latest letter. You _swore blind_ that your department had this case under control.’ Her tone is ice cold. ‘What do you have to say now, Officer?’

Fitz sees Officer Nelson swallow deeply. If he had been in a more merciful frame of mind he might feel sorry for him.

‘From this moment on, Miss Simmons will have full police protection,’ he says. ‘We will move her to a safe house, assign her a protection unit. Someone will be with her around the clock. There will be no expense spared.’

His words ought to be reassuring to Fitz. They hold the promise of Jemma being kept safe, which is, after all, all that he wants. And yet there is a niggling voice in the back of his mind that whispers of discontent. He crosses his arms over his torso.

At the opposite end of the sofa, Jemma clears her throat and gets to her feet.

‘Thank you, Officer Nelson,’ she says. ‘But that won’t be necessary.’

She bends down to collect the tray of untouched teas and coffees from the table and carries it over to the kitchen, leaving the rest of the party to gape after her.

‘Miss Simmons?’ Officer Nelson asks haltingly.

‘Jemma.’ There is a note of warning in Daisy’s voice.

‘That won’t be necessary,’ Jemma repeats, turning back. She looks at each of them in turn. ‘I have no desire for there to be no expense spared in having me followed around by a hoard of police officers for the next six months of my life. It would be a waste of valuable resources that _could_ be used to find out who killed Lucas and attacked us last night.’

Next to him, Fitz feels Officer Nelson shift uncomfortably.

‘But…’ he begins.

‘And besides,’ Jemma interrupts, ‘I already have all the protection I need. Isn’t that right, Fitz?’

All of a sudden, every eye in the room is on Fitz and he has to fight back the urge to sink even further into Jemma’s couch cushions. He can feel Bobbi and Officer Nelson looking him up and down, both of them seeming deeply unimpressed by what they find. Even Daisy looks vaguely doubtful, chewing at her bottom lip as she regards him.

But then Fitz looks up at Jemma and sees the trust in her eyes. She has faith in him, a faith that Fitz knows he would rather die than break.

He sits up a little straighter and gives a nod that he hopes shows more confidence than he feels.

‘Yes,’ he says, ‘it is.’

Officer Nelson looks as though he’d rather be anywhere else but here. But, despite his reservations, he finds that he cannot argue with Jemma’s wishes, especially when Daisy begrudgingly agrees to keeping her protection limited to just Fitz. He still seems rather doubtful, however, and keeps glancing sideways at Fitz as they discuss the logistics of the new security measures he will have to adopt, as if he is hoping Fitz will morph into three more protection officers in front of his eyes. When Fitz doesn’t, Officer Nelson heaves a heavy sigh and sends him home to pack a bag. If he is going to be moving in with Jemma full-time, he is going to need his toothbrush.

Once he is safely back in his flat, however, Fitz gets no further than throwing a t-shirt and clean underpants into his suitcase before he comes to a complete standstill. He sinks onto his bed and drops his head in his hands, the events of the last twenty-four hours circulating his mind on a loop.

Out of all his thoughts, one keeps coming back to him stronger than any of the others. _This wasn’t fair_. Jemma didn’t deserve this to be happening to her, nor did Daisy. Because their attacker had taken Jemma’s agenda, all of Flare’s events she was scheduled to attend would have to be cancelled. They couldn’t risk someone turning up at them to hurt her or anyone else. That meant that the product launch in the autumn would have to be postponed. Hundreds of hours, thousands of dollars, all their effort and energy – it would be wasted. All because some arse had felt he had the right to take a life. The singular injustice of it makes Fitz grit his teeth.

Getting up from the bed, he moves into the bathroom to collect his toothbrush and some shower gel. Catching his gaze in the mirror, he frowns.

‘It’s not your job to think about justice,’ he tells himself grimly, ‘that’s for the police to do.’

And yet, Fitz thinks to himself as he throws the toiletries into a bag, how sure could he be that the police were doing _their_ job? Officer Nelson had already severely underestimated the threat against Jemma. How could he be sure that they would do the right thing from now on?

Shaking his head, Fitz returns to the bedroom and tosses his toiletries into the suitcase. At least, he consoles himself, the thought of temporarily moving in with Jemma doesn’t feel as bad as it would have yesterday. Not today, when he knows he is safe to consider her a friend.

In spite of everything that had led them to that moment, he can’t help being glad that he’d been able to speak to her last night. Telling her about Jacob had been such a relief, even more so when she hadn’t judged him for it. Instead, she had helped him see things in a new and brighter light, lifting a weight from his shoulders that had been pressing down for months.

Fitz rubs his chin and smiles to himself. The more he thinks about it, the more he knows that Jemma is right. His mistake had never been being friends with Jacob. It had been trying to do a job that wasn’t his own.

Fitz is just bending forward to zip up his suitcase when a thought strikes him, as sudden and blindingly clear as lightning. He sits on his haunches for a minute, his heart beating faster and faster as the thought transforms into an idea in his mind. A broad grin stretches across his face.

Abandoning the suitcase, Fitz hurries into the kitchen, grabbing his phone, his laptop, and the monthly calendar from his bedroom wall on the way. He spreads the calendar out on the table, opens his laptop to Google, and picks up his phone.

When he’d first started as Jemma’s bodyguard, he’d been given password access to the same digital agenda their attacker had stolen last night. He’d used it a few times, to check where she was due for a meeting or when she was scheduled to work late, but had thought little of it otherwise. Now though, he can hardly wait for it to load.

The app opens on a weekly diary page, which Fitz knows Jemma can edit by selecting the relevant day. He quickly scan the week open in front of him – there are appointments and meetings scheduled for every day, their times and locations dutifully documented in the appropriate places. Fitz winces to see them, knowing that it is partly because of Jemma’s careful diligence that she is in such a dangerous position.

Pulling the wall calendar across the table towards him, he checks the date of the first meeting. Then, he types the office the meeting is being held in into the search bar and finds it on Google maps. Looking from one to the other, Fitz feels a surge of renewed determination.

As Jemma’s bodyguard, it is not his job to get her justice. But as her friend, he hopes he can take the liberty to make her life just a little less unfair.

When Officer Nelson and Bobbi leave Jemma’s apartment, Daisy stays.

She helps Jemma pick up the blankets to fold them on the sofa and washes up the coffee mugs at the sink. All this time, she is quiet, and it starts to unnerve Jemma a little. Daisy is always loud and brash and unafraid of saying what she thinks. To see her standing by her kitchen island, methodically drying cup after cup with a frown of intense concentration on her face makes her nervous.

Eventually, after placing the last mug back in the cupboard, Daisy turns to her with a sigh.

‘I hope you know what you’re doing.’

It’s an abrupt statement, but it is said with such concern that Jemma doesn’t notice. She tries to give her a reassuring smile.

‘I do, Daisy, I promise.’

Daisy sniffs, rubbing at her temples. ‘You could have had a police escort everywhere,’ she says. ‘A room in a safe house, with round the clock hour security and more people looking out for you than there are hours in a day.’

‘You’re right,’ Jemma agrees, ‘I could have.’ She takes the tea towel from her friend’s hands and hangs it on the oven door. ‘But I don’t want it and I don’t need it.’

She’d made up her mind about it even before Officer Nelson had opened his mouth. The thought of being the subject of such intense police surveillance, of being the responsibility of someone new every eight hours, made her recoil. No matter the danger, no matter the risk, she wasn’t going to put herself through that. Not when she already had Fitz.

As usual, Daisy seems to read her mind.

‘I know that you trust Fitz,’ she says cautiously, ‘and so does Mack, and I…I do too.’ She pauses, hesitating over her next words. ‘But are you sure he can handle this?’

Jemma feels a prickle of indignation on Fitz’s behalf. If Daisy had seen the way he had kept her safe last night, she wouldn’t be having any doubts.

‘Of course I am! And you should be too.’ She throws Daisy a pointed glance. ‘Seeing as you were the one who chose to hire him in the first place.’

Daisy rolls her eyes. ‘I did,’ she agrees, ‘that’s true. But when I hired him I never imagined that someone would try to _murder_ you in your own office. All I’m wondering is whether he’s going to be enough now.’

‘He was enough last night. He saved me.’

‘The way he told it, you saved each other.’

Jemma purses her lips and turns to face her friend. ‘Maybe we did,’ she says, a little softer. ‘But all that shows is that we work well together. We’re a team now. I don’t need anyone else to protect me but Fitz.’

Daisy regards her thoughtfully for a moment before suddenly giving the ghost of a smile. ‘Something’s changed between you two,’ she says, tilting her head to one side. ‘Hasn’t it?’

Feeling her cheeks start to flush, Jemma heads back to the living room. She sits down on a sofa and hugs a cushion to her chest. ‘I think a night like last night would change things between anyone. But, yes, I suppose so. I feel like we understand one another now. We’re…we’re friends.’

Somehow, for a reason that Jemma doesn’t know, this wins her the argument. Daisy gives another deep sigh and follows her, flopping down beside her so hard that the whole sofa shakes.

‘I just want what’s best for you,’ she says gently, ‘because I love you.’

Jemma smiles and reaches over to take her hand. ‘I know. And I love you too.’

On the coffee table in front of them, her phone buzzes. When Jemma leans forward, her heart jumps unexpectedly.

‘It’s Fitz,’ she informs Daisy, picking up the phone to tap out a reply. ‘He’s on his way back, he’ll be here in a few minutes.’

‘Alright.’ Daisy gets to her feet, stifling a yawn that reminds Jemma how early they’d woken her up on a Saturday morning. ‘In which case, I’m gonna head out. I want to talk with head of security at your building before I go, and I have a feeling that we’re going to be pretty busy with press this afternoon. Unfortunately I don’t think we can keep this under wraps for much longer.’

Jemma’s heart sinks. For a brief moment, she’d forgotten that the world outside her apartment existed.

‘Do you want me to come with you?’ she offers. ‘I know how much you hate doing damage control.’

Daisy snorts. ‘I do hate it, and you’re sweet, but no. Stay here and get the spare bed ready for your new roommate.’

Jemma rolls her eyes as she receives a parting kiss to the cheek and a warning not to open the door to anyone but Fitz. Then the door slams and Daisy is gone, her last suggestion still ringing in Jemma’s ears. Fitz had been happy to sleep on her sofa last night, but if he was going to be staying with her indefinitely – he was going to need a bed.

Pushing herself up off the sofa, Jemma heads straight for her linen closet. The apartment’s spare bedroom is right next to her own, but she has rarely had the need to use it. Mostly, it is stacked full of her files and documents, the work she had no choice but to bring home.

Jemma strips the old sheets off the bed to make room for fresh ones, deciding that keeping busy was the best cure for the anxiety slowly creeping back to her stomach. She had managed to keep it at bay as long as she was surrounded by other people, but now she is alone it has all come flooding back. Worse, it is now coupled with an odd agitation about the fact that, for the first time in many years, she won’t be living alone.

Folding a towel to sit at the foot of the bed, Jemma hopes that she and Fitz will rub along well together. She doesn’t see why they shouldn’t – they had last night, after all. But that had been an exceptional circumstance and, despite spending almost every day of the last month together, they still don’t really know one another at all. Or at least, they don’t know one another the way that people who live together should do.

Standing in the middle of her spare room, Jemma pauses. She stares and tries to imagine Fitz climbing between the clean sheets of the bed, tries to picture his clothes sitting on the chair, his phone on the bedside cabinet. Her cheeks warm as she realise that she can quite easily.

Maybe they didn’t know each other yet. But they were certainly about to.

The sound of her intercom buzzing brings Jemma sharply back to the present. Hurrying to the front door, she hesitates only momentarily before giving herself a mental shake. If anyone was coming here to murder her, they would hardly ring up to ask permission first.

‘Hello?’

‘Jemma!’ Fitz’s voice crackles through. ‘It’s me.’

A wave of relief mingled with anticipation washes over Jemma. She exhales slowly and presses the button. ‘Come on up.’

When she opens the door, Fitz is standing before her, a wall calendar and a laptop in his arms, breathing as heavily as if he’d just run up eight flights of stairs. Glancing behind him to see that the lift was still on the ground floor, Jemma is startled to realise that he had.

Fitz grins at her in lieu of a _hello_. ‘I’ve got an idea.’

Wordlessly, Jemma steps back to allow him in. Fitz heads straight for the coffee table, unceremoniously letting his laptop and calendar slide out of his arms.

‘It came to me when I was at home,’ he says, as he fumbles to set them straight. ‘I probably should have thought of it earlier, when Officer Nelson and Daisy were here, because we’ll need their seal of approval before we do anything, and also their help, but I can’t do anything about that now. I suppose we could call them and bring them back. How long ago did Daisy leave?’

‘About twenty minutes ago. Fitz,’ Jemma asks, peering into the hallway, ‘didn’t you bring anything else? Where are your clothes?’

He waves her off without turning around. ‘Oh, I can go back and get them any time. Now, can you please come and look at this?’

Jemma blinks at his back, a little surprised at his forwardness. Closing the door, she follows him to the coffee table. ‘Look at what?’

Fitz has opened his laptop to show her Google Maps, and flipped the calendar to the current month. His phone is on the table too and when Jemma bends forward to see it, her eyes widen.

‘Fitz, is that-‘

‘Your agenda,’ he finishes for her. ‘Yes, it is.’

‘Why do you have…?’ Jemma trails off, looking from the phone to Fitz. There is so much energy in his eyes she is having difficulty keeping up. She tries again. ‘Fitz, what is your idea?’

Fitz sucks in a deep breath, as though reminding himself to go slowly, and hands her the phone. ‘We know that whoever attacked us last night took this,’ he says, ‘that means that they want to know where you’re going. They want to know where you’ll be.’

Jemma swallows, hard. ‘I’m following.’

‘Officer Nelson believes that the only way to thwart them is to make sure you’re nowhere they’re expecting you to be. And I agree with him.’ Fitz looks up at her. ‘I just don’t think he’s going about it the right way.’

With a frown, Jemma sits on the sofa. ‘Now I don’t follow.’

She watches Fitz taps his fingers against the table before jumping up from the floor and moving to sit beside her.

‘He thinks it’s for the best if you stay as out of sight as you can,’ he explains, ‘that’s why he wants all the meetings and events in your agenda cancelled, why you’re going to have to push back the Sunburst launch. But that doesn’t seem fair – not to you, or Daisy, or anyone at Flare.’

Jemma raises an eyebrow. ‘Are you saying you’ve found a way for us to keep the launch on schedule?’

Fitz nods, his face filled with hope. ‘I think I have. Look,’ he points to the phone she is still holding in her hand, ‘these are your appointments for this week. Where they are, when they are. These are the places that whoever is threatening you will expect you to be. Well, we’re going to make sure you’re not there.’

‘Where will I be instead?’

Fitz shrugs. ‘There, but two hours before. Or three hours later. Maybe you’ll be there at the time they suspect, just at a place thirty miles away. We can switch it up, keep them on their toes.’

Slowly, understanding dawns and Jemma stops frowning.

‘You want me to keep my schedule,’ she says, ‘but change the times and the places so they can never find me.’

‘Yeah! This way all your hard work doesn’t go to waste and you won’t feel like a prisoner in your own home.’ Fitz looks up at her, seeking her approval. ‘What do you think?’

The cogs inside Jemma’s mind are ticking over. What Fitz is proposing – a way for her to keep some semblance of normality, of independence – is all she has wanted, ever since this whole thing had started. Somehow, he is the only person who has managed to recognise how important this is to her. He is the only person who has gone out of their way to find a solution that would also keep her safe.

Looking at him now, feeling the heat of the nervous excitement practically radiating off him, Jemma can hardly speak for gratitude.

‘I think it’s marvellous.’

‘Great.’ Fitz lets out a long breath, an uncontrollable grin returning to his face. ‘That’s great. I, um, better call Officer Nelson. I’ve already got one week planned out to show him how it would work. Plus, if they can stop the details of the break in from leaking to the press, then whoever is behind this won’t know that we know they took the agenda. If we can stay one step ahead of them, we’ll be the better for it.’

Jemma nods. His eagerness is infectious, she can feel her own pulse quickening just by watching him. She is excited, she realises with a start, for whatever comes next.

‘That sounds sensible. Would you like a cup of tea while you do that?’

The way Fitz looks at her you’d think she’d just offered him a million dollars. ‘Jemma,’ he says sincerely, ‘I would love one.’

He calls Officer Nelson immediately and, when Jemma carries him over a steaming mug of tea, he fumbles around beneath his calendar for a coaster to place it on. It makes Jemma smile and she is reminded fleetingly of the feeling she’d had the night before, of how perfectly in place it had felt to have him in her home.

Already, her fears of how they would fare living together are fading in her mind. With Fitz here with her now, Jemma can hardly remember why she was scared in the first place.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Turning back to the larder, her eyes fall on a jar of golden syrup almost immediately. It was strange, she muses to herself, but before Fitz had moved in she’d never had such a thing in the house. She’d never had an all-in-one shower gel and shampoo in the bathroom either, or pineapple juice in the fridge, but somehow after less than a month she couldn’t imagine her home without them. Fitz’s life has interwoven almost effortlessly with her own, and Jemma is surprised to find that she likes it. In fact, she likes it a lot."
> 
> Clues and carts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you for all your comments! people seem very excited about them FINALLY living together, so hopefully this will be a good chapter for you all.

‘Fitz?’ Jemma raps on his bedroom door exasperatedly. ‘Are you awake yet?’

From inside, there is a noncommittal muttering and a creaking of bed springs. Then nothing. Glancing down at her watch, Jemma shakes her head and knocks again.

‘Fitz!’

Suddenly the door opens, and Fitz’s head appears in front of her. His hair is tousled with sleep and he rubs at his eyes, trying to look more awake than he is.

‘What is it?’ he mumbles, squinting down the hallway. ‘Is something wrong?’

‘Lots of things,’ Jemma retorts, ‘but currently the most important is that we’re supposed to be leaving in half an hour and you’re still in bed!’

Confusion flickers over Fitz’s face and the door falls open a little wider. ‘Half an hour?’

‘Mmm.’ Jemma crosses her arms over her chest. ‘So, if you want to have a shower before we go, it might be good if you got a move on.’

‘Right.’ Fitz nods, sucking in a deep breath. ‘I’d, uh, better get on then.’

He is about to move past her into the apartment when Jemma stops him with a single hand to his chest.

‘Um, Fitz? You should probably put some trousers on first.’

Fitz’s eyes widen, before dropping down his body to the tatty t-shirt and tartan boxer shorts he had worn to sleep in.

‘Oh, yeah. Good call.’

The tops of his ears pinken as he makes a hasty retreat back into his room.

Folding her lips together to stop herself from smiling, Jemma turns around and hurries back to the kitchen. The pot of porridge she had left on the stove is thankfully unburnt and smells enticingly of vanilla. Inhaling deeply, Jemma gives it a final stir before turning to chop some fruits to sprinkle on top.

She has just quartered some strawberries when Fitz appears, more suitably dressed in a fresh t-shirt and jeans but still looking sleepy.

‘I thought the whole idea of a holiday,’ he complains, hoisting himself onto a stool at the breakfast bar, ‘was that you were able to sleep in.’

Jemma chuckles. ‘That’s true. But I’m not actually on holiday, am I?’

She’d had this week booked off from work in her agenda, which meant that whoever was after her would likely be assuming she was on holiday for the next five days. Consequently, she was not. Instead, she and Fitz were taking advantage of her extra working hours and using them to make visits to all of Flare’s distribution centres to make sure they were ready for the Sunburst launch in the autumn.

Although it wasn’t a real holiday, Jemma was still grateful for the time it was allowing her to spend outside of the office. Her employees watched her and Fitz differently now that they knew he wasn’t really an intern, and the heightened tension in her department felt a little suffocating at times. She hopes that this break of a week would allow things to have settled down a bit by the time she returned.

‘No,’ Fitz admits, ‘but that doesn’t mean we couldn’t have had an extra half an hour in bed.’

‘I’m afraid it does. The warehouse we’re going to today is out by the coast to make optimum use of its tidal-powered servers. It takes at least an hour to get there and I promised we’d be there by nine thirty.’

Fitz stifles a groan and Jemma sweeps the porridge off the stove to dump it into a bowl. She’d learned early on that when it came to her bodyguard slash roommate, food was an excellent distraction.

‘I made you breakfast,’ she announces cheerfully, sliding the bowl down in front of him. ‘Do you want strawberries or Greek yogurt on top?’

Fitz breathes in the warm steam rising from the hot bowl and Jemma can practically see his grumpiness melt. He looks up at her sheepishly.

‘I don’t suppose we’ve got anything less healthy?’

Jemma rolls her eyes at his insatiable sweet tooth. ‘Let me see what I can find.’

Turning back to the larder, her eyes fall on a jar of golden syrup almost immediately. It was strange, she muses to herself, but before Fitz had moved in she’d never had such a thing in the house. She’d never had an all-in-one shower gel and shampoo in the bathroom either, or pineapple juice in the fridge, but somehow after less than a month she couldn’t imagine her home without them. Fitz’s life has interwoven almost effortlessly with her own, and Jemma is surprised to find that she likes it. In fact, she likes it a lot.

She waves the syrup in his direction. ‘Will this do?’

Fitz beams as she holds it out, the back of his head lit by the rising sun behind him.

‘Perfect,’ he says.

It takes them a little while to extricate themselves from rush hour traffic in the city, but as soon as they do, Jemma takes charge of the map. Fitz protests at this, arguing that they have the satnav so they don’t need a map, but Jemma insists.

‘It’s a new-build,’ she explains, smoothing the map against the dashboard. ‘It won’t be on the system yet and I don’t want us to get lost. There’s a lot I want to do there today.’

Fitz snorts. ‘And you think I’d get us lost? That’s just charming, Simmons.’

‘Oh, you know what I mean.’ Jemma leans over the passenger seat to give him a gentle shove to the shoulder. She hasn’t sat in the back of the car since the night of the break in. ‘I want us to get there on time.’

‘And we will. I promise.’ Fitz glances across at her as she studies the map. ‘Tell me more about the tidal-powered servers. It sound really interesting.’

Jemma perks up instantly. ‘It is! Each of our warehouses are fuelled by a difference source of renewable energy and are sized accordingly. This one is our largest yet, it only opened at the start of the year and was specifically designed to house the Sunburst range.’

It had been her idea, her pitch to Daisy, one that she’d spent months cultivating the research for. Since then, she has followed the distribution centre’s progress with interest and is highly looking forward to her first visit there today.

Much to her satisfaction, Fitz seems genuinely impressed. ‘That’s incredible. You’d have thought innovation like that would have been front page news.’

Jemma pulls a face. ‘Yes. Well. We had some, um, unfortunate press about it during the build so Daisy and I decided it was best to keep it out of the media once it was finished.’

‘What kind of unfortunate press?’

A bitter taste fills Jemma’s mouth at the memory. ‘The CEO of one of our biggest competitors claimed we’d stolen his idea,’ she explains. ‘It was utterly unfounded, of course, but he shouted loud. Daisy and I decided it wasn’t worth it to drudge all that back up again once it was done.’

She turns to Fitz just in time to see him wince sympathetically. ‘I can see why,’ he says. There is a pause before he asks, casually, ‘which competitor was it?’

‘Kitson Computers.’ Jemma can hear the distaste in her voice as she says the name. ‘I can’t say it came as a shock. Mr Kitson has been a pain in Daisy’s backside ever since she started Flare. He’s constantly trying to one up us. He’s mightily successful in his own right, but I think he’s always been rather jealous that two women can play the game better than he can.’

Fitz falls quiet, staring intently towards the horizon as he navigates the country road. Jemma can practically hear his mind ticking over, and knows precisely what his next question will be.

‘Has he been investigated by the police?’ he asks.

Jemma shakes her head, leaning back in her seat. ‘That was Daisy and I’s first thought too,’ she says with a sigh, ‘but we never got past the front door. His lawyers put their foot down. They argued that the only evidence we had was speculation, and that was never going to be enough for the police to get a warrant. And they were right.’

Fitz bites his lip. ‘Are you still suspicious of him?’

‘Oh, I don’t know, Fitz.’ Feeling a headache start to press at her temples, Jemma massages them with her fingertips. ‘Even after what happened to us at Flare, I’m still having a hard time believing _anyone_ could be capable of doing something like this. It just…’ She sighs again. ‘It all still feels unthinkable.’

Fitz doesn’t respond to this. Instead, he gives her shoulder a light, comforting rub, and turns his attention back to the road. But Jemma can tell he hasn’t stopped thinking about what she’d said.

As they near the coast, her spirits lift. She has always loved being by the sea – maybe it was the ocean air, the sound of the waves, or simply being so far removed from her life in the city, but Jemma has always felt more grounded there. She rolls down the window and peers into the distance, eager for her first glance of the warehouse and the ocean beyond.

When it comes, there is no missing it. The Flare warehouse rises out of the sea, curving over the landscape like a smooth silver wave. Even as Jemma looks at it, it seems to stretch onwards into the horizon without stopping.

Beside her, Fitz gives a low whistle.

‘Did you know it was this big?’

‘Of course I did,’ Jemma says airily, though her mind is spinning. ‘I designed it, didn’t I?’

‘Hmm,’ is all Fitz can say as he pulls into the warehouse car park.

The truth is, overseeing the plans for the centre on paper and seeing it in real life were two completely different things. Jemma’s itinerary for the day had been reliant on the former, and her heart starts to thump thinking about how much longer it is going to take her to achieve all she wants to.

Taking a deep breath, she looks across to Fitz. This has become a habit of hers over the last few weeks – whenever she finds herself feeling anxious or in need of assurance, she looks to him and finds all that she needs. As if to prove this, Fitz seems to feel her eyes on him and looks up at her to smile. Smiling back, Jemma feels her heartrate ease. However long this takes, at least she won’t be doing this alone.

Waiting by the doors of the warehouse is the manager of the warehouse, a young woman Jemma recognises from her interview for the position. Climbing out of the car, she greets her with a warm smile.

‘Kathy! It’s so lovely to see you again.’

Kathy’s chest swells as she steps forward to shake her hand. ‘Miss Simmons, we’re so delighted to have you visit.’

‘I’m delighted to be here,’ Jemma replies. Hearing Fitz come up behind them, she turns to him. ‘This is Leo Fitz. He’s part of Flare’s security team.’

He was _her_ security team, she thinks with pride.

‘You’re welcome here too, Mr Fitz,’ Kathy says politely. ‘We received your email and all the measures you asked for are in place. No press know that Miss Simmons is here and all our employees are on a mandatory team building course, so you’ll have the place to yourself.’

Fitz nods at her, appreciative, and Kathy clasps her hands together. ‘I understand you’ve got a lot to do today, Miss Simmons. What can I show you first?’

‘I need to see the warehouse space, please, Kathy,’ Jemma says, as they step through the doors and into the reception area. ‘There’s been a change in the Sunburst models’ dimensions and I need to reassess how much stock we’ll be able to fit in here.’

‘Of course, of course.’ Patting down her blazer, Kathy produces a set of key cards, almost identical to the ones used at Flare’s headquarters, attached to lanyards. ‘These will get you access to any space in the building. Could I help you both with anything else?’

‘No, Kathy, but thank you,’ Jemma says with another smile. ‘You’ve been wonderful, and I’m sure you have a lot of work to be getting on with, without babysitting the two of us.’

Kathy beams at her before giving them both an awkward bow and retreating to her office at the back of reception. Jemma watches her go with a mixture of fondness and satisfaction. Kathy had stood out to her during her interview not only for her enthusiasm but for her kindness to her fellow candidates. She has no doubt that the warehouse was a welcome place to work under her supervision.

When she looks back to Fitz, she finds that he too is staring after Kathy.

‘Fitz?’

His gaze turns back to her and Jemma is surprised to see the admiration in his eyes.

‘She really likes you,’ he observes.

Jemma’s cheeks warm. ‘Well, I don’t think that should come as too much of a surprise,’ she says, fiddling with her access key as she leads the way to the warehouse. ‘I am very likeable.’

Fitz holds the door for her as she steps inside. ‘I know you are,’ he says

The warehouse space is cavernous, just as Jemma had feared it would be. Large shelving units stretch as far as her eye can see, and even the cool blue lighting illuminating the designated paths between them cannot soften the dismal sight before her. Once more, she is filled with disappointment over how long the task is going to take.

Next to her, she can hear Fitz fidgeting.

‘Uh,’ he begins hesitantly, ‘you were kidding when you said we had to reassess _every single_ shelving unit, right?’

Jemma sighs as she reaches into her handbag for her clipboard and pen. ‘No, Fitz,’ she says wearily. ‘I’m afraid I wasn’t.’

They start at the front of the warehouse, figuring that they can walk straight back through the middle once they are done. It is slow-going work, with Jemma having to check the dimensions of every shelving unit they walk through and note it down on her clipboard before they move on. A full hour goes by before they have ticked off less than a quarter of the units, and Jemma finds herself standing at the foot of one, staring down the endless rows with frustration.

‘We’re never going to get this done in time,’ she mutters. ‘Fitz?’

She turns around, expecting to find him trailing a few feet behind her, as he had been for the last hour. Instead, Jemma’s heart plummets as she realises she is alone.

‘Fitz?’

She spins in a circle, searching for where he might have gone. They are both in such a large, open space that the sound of her voice is not going to carry well. No matter how loud she shouts, it could take an age for Fitz to hear her. Jemma finds that she is fighting back panic. She doesn’t want to be alone out here.

‘Psst. Jemma, over here!’

Turning sharply towards the sound of his voice, Jemma chokes down a sob. Fitz appears from behind a shelving unit, his face never more welcome to her than it is in this moment. Apparently oblivious to the worry he’d caused her, he beckons to her with a grin.

Stomping over to him, Jemma hits him, hard, on the arm.

Fitz looks at her with offence. ‘Ow! What was that for?’

‘You disappeared!’ Jemma accuses. ‘I turned around, and you were gone. I didn’t know where you were!’

‘Oh.’ Fitz’s expression softens as he rubs his arm. ‘I’m sorry.’

Her immediate panic now passing, Jemma realises how ridiculous she must sound when he was only an arm’s length away. She shakes her head. ‘It’s alright. But what on earth were you doing?’

Fitz’s grin returns and he takes her by the elbow to guide her around the corner. There, tucked away in a corner, is a motorized utility cart with enough seating for two people behind its steering wheel. Jemma looks from Fitz to the cart and back again, and reads in his eyes exactly what he is thinking. She folds her arms over her chest.

‘No.’

‘Jemma,’ Fitz wheedles, ‘we’d get the shelves assessed in half the time.’

‘No!’

‘You don’t even need keys, I’ve checked. Our access cards are enough to start the ignition. Why would Kathy have given them to us if she didn’t want us to use them?’

‘Fitz!’ Jemma hisses in horror as he demonstrates this to her. She hurries forward to grasp the steering wheel, in case he was tempted to drive away without her. ‘You can’t just drive this thing. Surely you need some kind of licence.’

He shrugs, already examining the pedals by his feet. ‘I have a regular driving licence. How much different could it be?’

Jemma groans inwardly. As much as she hates it, Fitz is making sense. With the cart’s help, they could finish the reassessment in accordance with her original plan and still have time for a tour of the tidal servers before they had to leave. The more he tries to convince her, the weaker her resolve grows.

‘I don’t know, Fitz,’ she says lamely. ‘I don’t think we should.’

Fitz leans out of the cart and gives her a serious look. ‘Jemma. For the last forty five minutes, my stomach has been rumbling so loud I don’t know how you haven’t heard it yet. I need us to finish this soon, so that I can get back to the tuna sandwich I left in the car.’ He pauses. ‘Please?’

And, apparently, that was all he had needed to say.

Rolling her eyes, Jemma nudges Fitz with her knee. ‘Move over.’

His eyebrows shoot upwards as he shuffles over the seat, making space for her behind the steering wheel. ‘Wait, are _you_ going to drive?’

The bafflement in his voice sends an unexpected thrill through Jemma’s veins. She sits beside him and dumps her bag and clipboard on his lap.

‘Yes,’ she says sweetly. ‘I am.’

She presses the accelerator pedal with her foot and, almost immediately, the cart swings forward to crash into a shelving unit. Fitz snorts, and Jemma has to bite the inside of her cheek to stop herself from following suit. Maybe driving a utility cart was a little different to driving a car after all. Determined to be undeterred, she tilts her chin up and tries again.

Between the two of them, Fitz and Jemma quickly figure it out. They go slow at first, testing different pressures and speeds until they know enough about the vehicle they are jointly driving to get around the corners of the units smoothly. The cart carries them steadily around the warehouse, allowing Jemma to complete her reassessment so efficiently that, before she knows it, they have reached the end of the shelving units. She is almost disappointed.

‘Well?’ Fitz asks her. ‘Does this mean we’re done?’

Jemma is about to nod, and disembark the cart, when she finds herself staring down the middle of the warehouse, back to where they had both begun. A sudden recklessness, a need for release, grabs at her and she returns her grip to the steering wheel.

‘Almost. But not quite.’

Turning her head to one side, she meets Fitz’s eye just in time to watch the understanding dawn. His eyes light up and he grins at her, before reaching over to place his hands on the wheel too. They sit just below her own, and a lightness fills Jemma’s chest. Biting down on an irrepressible smile, she hits the accelerator.

At its top speed, the utility cart might be hitting thirty miles an hour. To Jemma, it feels like it is flying. Beside her, Fitz lets out a whoop, and then she is laughing, the lightness inside her spilling over.

She is enjoying herself so much that when they reach the front of the warehouse, Fitz has to jerk his foot out to hit the brake before they crash into the wall. But he is laughing too, a wonderful sound that only makes Jemma want to laugh longer, louder, just to keep him laughing with her.

By the time Kathy finds them a while later, alarmed by the amount of noise coming from her warehouse, they are still laughing and Jemma’s clipboard is lying abandoned on the floor.

‘Thank you for today.’

‘Hmm?’ Fitz is slurping noodles straight from the takeaway box. ‘What do you mean?’

Shrugging, Jemma sets her own box of fried rice down on the coffee table. By the time they’d got home from the warehouse, she’d been too tired to cook so had picked up the phone for takeaway instead. She and Fitz were eating it on the sofas instead of at the breakfast bar, where they usually ate together. Looking at him now, with a blanket draped over his knees and soy sauce on his cheek, Jemma decides it is a nice change.

‘For coming with me,’ she says simply. ‘I would have found it all so much harder if you hadn’t been there.’

‘You did all the work,’ Fitz replies. ‘All I did was bug you about the cart and eat all the sandwiches Kathy sent out for.’

This was true, but he’d also done much more than that. He’d given her the push she’d needed to go inside in the first place, the courage not to be daunted by the task ahead of her. He’d even found a way to make the burden lighter for her, and Jemma’s lungs were still pleasantly aching to attest to that. All of this seems so simple to her. She wonders why it is so difficult for Fitz to see it for himself.

‘All the same,’ she says, ‘Thank you. Everything feels so much easier with you.’

She sees Fitz smile into his noodles. Then, he clears his throat abruptly. ‘I mean, of course. You're welcome. That’s my job, right?’

The reminder of this is jarring, particularly as she has spent the whole day being perfectly happy to forget about the real reason he was accompanying her. Jemma blinks.

‘Of course,’ she echoes. ‘Your job.’

She must have sounded as flat as she feels, because a flicker of regret passes over Fitz’s face and he bites his lip.

‘My job and my pleasure.’

Jemma smiles, the same lightness from earlier that day returning to fill up her lungs. Looking up, she sees a sincerity in Fitz’s eyes that warms her cheeks so that she is sure she would be blushing if the lights weren’t so low.

Wordlessly, she holds out her takeaway box. Fitz does the same, and they swap suppers and chopsticks with an understanding that feels as natural to Jemma as breathing.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Jemma sighs deeply. Although he can’t see them, Fitz can tell that her hands are agitated beneath her desk. He knows her well enough now to know that this, combined with how reluctant she is to meet his eye, means that there is something she is finding difficult to say to him.
> 
> ‘I have an idea,’ she admits. When she finally looks up at him, she grimaces. ‘But I’m afraid you’re not going to like it.’"
> 
> A fake date - or is it?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> we're over halfway through! this another fun chapter to write, i hope you all enjoy it!

Fitz feels like he is alone in the prototype department.

Objectively, he is not. Jemma and Daisy’s employees are milling about him as usual, their chatter creating a not-unpleasant hum of activity that swirls around his desk. But, in terms of mental presence, Fitz feels very alone.

None of Flare’s top developers, designers or consultants seem to be at all focused on their work. Instead, each of their heads is bent over their phone or tablet, where Fitz can see explosions of brightly coloured pixels and hear excitable pings. Whatever they are engaged with is clearly so absorbing that they have all forgotten the department’s strict policy on the use of headphones.

Fitz’s curiosity is at its peak, and he is about to approach Olivia at the desk next door to ask her what all the fuss is about, when Jemma appears in the door of her office. She gestures furtively to him. Leaping at the chance to get out from behind his desk, Fitz hurries over. He is surprised to find that, out of the whole department, not a single eye is drawn up from their screens to follow him.

‘That’s new,’ he observes, as soon as the door is closed.

‘Hmm?’ Jemma’s voice sounds a little distracted. ‘What is?’

Fitz motions to the closed door. ‘Them. Usually they can’t wait to gawk at us when I come in here, but today none of them batted an eyelid. What’s gotten into them?’

Jemma frowns, then rolls her eyes. ‘Oh, it must be Eco-Quest.’

‘Eco-what?’

‘Eco-Quest,’ she repeats, ‘it’s a game. You gain more points and levels the more ways you discover to save energy. Apparently it works a lot like Pokemon-Go, in that the landscape of the game correlates to our own and as you travel out here, you travel in there. You pick up new energy saving techniques in different locations. It appears to be rather addictive.’

‘Huh.’ Fitz considers this. He’d been a Pokemon-Go aficionado himself when it had first come out, so he can well understand the appeal. ‘Is it part of the promotion for the Sunburst line?’

Jemma wrinkles her nose. ‘Um, no. The app was developed by Kitson Computers.’

‘Seriously?’ Fitz is incredulous. ‘You’re okay with your employees using the app made by your biggest rival?’

‘Of course!’ Jemma says. ‘Daisy and I always like to keep one eye on what Kitson is up to and this is the perfect way to do it. Initially we just asked Rick from main reception to give the game a go, but it seems to have spread throughout the company. Even Elena has been known to play from time to time.’

Fitz can see the logic behind this, and but at the same time he can’t help feeling uncomfortable. He hasn’t been able to stop thinking about what Jemma had told him about Kitson’s CEO and his jealousy of her and Daisy’s success. Somehow it didn’t feel right for anything produced by him to have found its way into the very heart of Flare.

And besides,’ Jemma continues, ‘it’s not as though we’re at all threatened by him.’ She purses her lips in a poorly concealed smirk. ‘Our profit margins are going up on their own, without the need for such playful gimmicks.’

Fitz snorts, and drops into a chair. ‘I take it you called me in here to plan out next week, yeah?’

Every Friday afternoon, he and Jemma looked at what her agenda had planned for the week ahead and spent a few hours rearranging her appointments. Usually, Fitz had made some rudimentary plans already, but he always wanted to get her approval before he made any changes. After all, it was her life. He didn’t want to be its sole architect.

‘Not exactly.’ Jemma sits down heavily behind her desk. Her fingers fidget with some papers. ‘I actually wanted to talk to you about my mother.’

This was unexpected. ‘Your mother?’

‘Yes, Fitz. My mother.’ With a deep sigh, Jemma looks up at him. ‘She’s coming to visit.’

Relief fills Fitz’s chest. For a moment there, he’d been afraid she was going to say something far worse. ‘Yeah,’ he says with a nod. ‘I know.’

Mrs Simmons’s visit had been a preoccupation of Fitz’s for weeks. It was highlighted in Jemma’s agenda with such importance that he was terrified whoever was after her would make that the day they struck. Consequently, he had taken every precaution to make sure they would never be able to find her.

‘I’ve swapped the reservation at the restaurant five times,’ he explains, whipping out his phone to show Jemma the emails he and the maître d' had been sending back and forth for the last week. Fitz could tell that the man was getting quite frustrated with his chopping and changing, but he didn’t care. The only thing that mattered was Jemma being safe. ‘And I’ll change it again, in person, the day before you both go. Everything is under control.’

‘Not everything.’ Jemma shifts, guiltily. ‘Fitz, I have to tell you something. My mother doesn’t know.’

Fitz frowns. ‘Doesn’t know what?’

His stomach drops as Jemma looks at him desperately. No. She couldn’t possibly mean…

‘I didn’t want to tell her at the start,’ Jemma says, ‘because I knew she’d only worry. And then the longer things have been going on, the harder it’s felt to bring it up, and now everything feels too big to even _begin_.’

Fitz shakes his head in disbelief. ‘Jemma, are you telling me that your mother has no idea about what’s happening to you? Not about Lucas, the letters, the trial?’ He gulps. ‘Not about me?’

‘No,’ Jemma confirms miserably. ‘She doesn’t know about any of this.’

Slumping back in his chair, Fitz allows this new knowledge to sink in. He wants to kick himself for not imagining this sooner. With all the care Jemma took for the feelings of others, he should have guessed she wouldn’t have told the people closest to her about the danger she was in. He rubs between his eyes.

‘Okay. We can…we can deal with this. I’ll just have to sit at a nearby table while you two have your meal. She need never know why I’m really there.’

Even as he says it, Fitz isn’t entirely comfortable with this plan. He’d much rather be sitting at the table with them, as he’d initially assumed he would be. That way, if anything happened, there would be no way for him to lose sight of Jemma when she needed him the most.

Jemma pulls a face. ‘I’m not sure if that would be sensible. Remember what happened at the supermarket? Or that time Daisy and I went for sushi?’

Fitz winces back at the memory. He’d accompanied Jemma and Daisy to their sushi dinner and, wanting to give them both some privacy, hung back as they picked their dishes off the conveyor belt that circled the restaurant. Like the time he’d taken Jemma to the supermarket, his close surveillance of the girls had raised the waitress’ suspicions. Jemma and Daisy had needed to intervene quite quickly to stop him from getting arrested.

‘It’s not ideal,’ he admits, ‘but I don’t see what other choice we have.’

Jemma sighs deeply. Although he can’t see them, Fitz can tell that her hands are agitated beneath her desk. He knows her well enough now to know that this, combined with how reluctant she is to meet his eye, means that there is something she is finding difficult to say to him.

‘I have an idea,’ she admits, ‘for how we can get around it.’ When she finally looks up at him, she grimaces. ‘But I’m afraid you’re not going to like it.’

Unable to sit still, Fitz paces. He’s been ready to leave for the last half hour, but Jemma is still in her bedroom, doing whatever it was girls did before going out for dinner with their mothers. Mothers, Fitz thinks with a gulp, who had no idea their daughters were protected witnesses in murder cases.

He walks the length of the living room for a bit, then tries to perch on the edge of the sofa. As much as he hates to admit it to himself, Fitz is nervous. He hadn’t been before, when he had all the arrangements under control and thought he knew exactly how this evening was going to go. But now…

Suddenly, Fitz’s gaze latches onto the cuffs of his sleeves and the subtle pattern of checks on his shirt. He stands abruptly. The shirt is too formal, he decides. If he is quick, he will have just enough time to change.

He is just about to enter his bedroom, the buttons on his cuffs already undone, when Jemma’s door opens and he stops dead in his tracks.

Jemma steps out, wearing a calf-length dress covered with a print of flowers. Her hair, freshly washed, spills over her shoulders in glossy curls and her lips are tinted a pearly pink. She purses them together when she sees him staring at her and Fitz can see in her eyes that she is just as anxious as he is.

‘Well?’ she asks softly. ‘What do you think?’

Try as he might, Fitz’s tongue cannot find the words – any words – to tell her how she looks. He isn’t sure that he could ever find them, even if he looked for a hundred years.

Jemma seems to take note of his unbuttoned cuffs, and the direction he’d been heading in before she’d arrived. She sighs, but there is no disappointment in her voice.

‘Fitz…you don’t have to do this. If you don’t want to, I can always call Mum and tell her that I’m ill and we can go for dinner another time.’ She shrugs. ‘All you have to do is say.’

With every word that she says, another thread of Fitz’s nerves comes undone. By the time she has finished speaking, he feels only a quiet confidence – in her, in himself, and in the team that they were when they were together.

Very deliberately, he rebuttons his cuffs.

‘We’d better get going,’ he says, checking his watch. ‘Don’t want to leave your mum waiting, yeah?’

Jemma’s face breaks into a grateful smile and she nods. When she opens the door and steps out into the hallway, Fitz has to close his eyes and take a moment to still his skipping heart before he follows her.

In the end, they do leave Judy Simmons waiting. The stream of traffic they join after leaving Jemma’s apartment gets stuck in a bottleneck, and by the time they arrive at the restaurant she is already there, chatting nineteen to the dozen with the valet. Fitz sees Jemma bite the inside of her cheek before she climbs out of the car.

‘Mum!’

‘Jemma!’ Judy exclaims, leaving the valet’s side to greet her daughter at the same time as Fitz approaches him to pass over the keys. ‘At last. Where on earth have you been?’

‘I’m so sorry, Mum,’ Fitz hears Jemma apologise as she kisses her mother on both cheeks. ‘The traffic was terrible.’

‘Well, darling, that’s what you get for living in such a big city. You know you wouldn’t have this kind of problem back home. Why, I was saying to your father just the other day that I…’

Fitz sees Jemma’s shoulders tense, but before she has time to interject Judy’s gaze has slid past her to land on him instead.

‘Oh! And who’s this?’

Jemma turns her head towards him and in that brief moment Fitz sees doubt flicker over her face. Sucking in a deep breath, he smiles politely and steps forward to slip his hand into hers, just as they had agreed.

The contact seems to give Jemma a little more courage, because she is wearing a matching smile as she turns back to her mother.

‘Mum, this is Fitz,’ she says, and Fitz hopes he is the only one to hear her voice quiver. ‘He’s my boyfriend.’

Judy’s eyes widen and Fitz is struck by how much of her daughter he can see in that simple gesture alone. Like Jemma, Judy’s eyes are lively and bright with curiosity, but whereas Jemma’s eyes have a softness to them, Judy’s are sharp. He feels under more and more scrutiny the longer she looks at him and suddenly understands Jemma’s reservation that they could pull this off. Judy Simmons seems like a woman who missed nothing.

‘Fitz,’ she says carefully, ‘what a pleasure to meet you.’

The way she says it makes it sound like a question instead of a statement. Fitz tries to smile wider at her as he responds.

‘It’s a pleasure to meet you too. I’ve, uh, heard a lot about you.’

‘And I,’ Judy observes, ‘have heard absolutely nothing about you.’ She leans towards him conspiratorially. ‘Let’s remedy that over dinner, shall we?’

Fitz’s smile is practically a grimace as he nods at her. By his side, he feels Jemma squeeze his hand supportively as they follow Judy through the restaurant doors.

Inside, the restaurant is humming comfortably, as waiting staff in black and white circle tables of diners, producing plates of impeccably arranged food and serving bottles of wine that probably cost more per glass than Fitz’s rent. As a waiter shows them to their table, specially secluded behind a living wall of fresh green plants, he finds himself scanning the space for the exits he’d already identified on the blueprints. Whether he is planning an escape from danger or from Judy Simmons, Fitz couldn’t say.

When they reach the table, he remembers just in time to pull Jemma’s chair out for her, slipping her jacket off her shoulders once she’s seated. She gives him a sweet smile as he sits beside her, reaching out to twist their fingers together once more. Across the table, Fitz can feel Judy watching them, eagle-eyed.

‘Well, then,’ she says, as the waiter appears to fill their glasses with ruby red wine, ‘tell me how you two lovebirds met.’

Fitz’s cheeks colour at the word _lovebirds_ and he places his hand over his glass to signify that he doesn’t want any wine.

‘At work,’ Jemma says smoothly.

Judy gives a little chuckle. ‘I might have guessed.’ She turns, addressing her next remark to Fitz. ‘She never goes anywhere else, as I’m sure you know. She acts like her work is her life.’

‘It’s a very demanding job,’ Fitz says loyally. ‘And I’m not sure anyone else could do it as well as she can.’

Judy looks a little surprised at this, and sniffs as she lifts her glass to her lips. ‘Hmm. Quite.’

Beneath the table, Jemma presses his thumb with her own gratefully. It helps Fitz to breathe a little bit easier.

She hadn’t been wrong when she’d told him he wouldn’t like her idea. He hadn’t liked it at first, but not for the reason she had assumed. Jemma had been afraid that pretending to be her boyfriend was so far beyond his remit that he would find it too hard to get through the evening. ‘You’ve already gone above and beyond for me,’ she had said, chewing her lip, ‘I hate to ask you to go even further.’ Fitz had shaken his head and assured her he could handle it. What he kept to himself was the real reason he had reservations about their charade. Deep down in his heart he was afraid that, far from finding it too hard, he would find it dangerously easy.

As the meal goes on though, Fitz finds it more and more difficult to remember this. The food when it arrives is delicious, although the portions are rather too small for his liking. He eats as slowly as he can, trying to make it last longer, and resists the urge to run his finger across the plate to soak up the last of the jus. He gets the feeling this is something Judy would not approve of.

As he is eating, Jemma and her mother talk. Judy Simmons has a lot of questions about her daughter’s life, which Jemma manages to answer as dutifully as she can, although Fitz notices that she wavers whenever the topic grows too close to Flare. Luckily, Judy seems to have very little interest in her work, preferring to stick to the personal side of her life.

‘Tell me more about the two of you, then,’ she says, once their first course plates have been cleared away. ‘I know you met at work,’ delivered with a subtle eye roll, ‘but how long have you been an item?’

‘Only for a couple of months,’ Jemma says, glancing quickly across at Fitz. They’d agreed that it would be best to stick as closely to the facts of their relationship as they could. If they started inventing things, there was a greater chance of something going wrong. ‘Fitz, um, works for a close associate of Flare.’

‘I see.’ Judy smiles knowingly at them, as she takes a dessert menu from their waiter. ‘Love at first sight, I take it?’

‘No,’ both Fitz and Jemma say at once. Judy’s face falls in confusion.

‘That is,’ Jemma adds quickly, as Fitz buries his head in his own menu, ‘we didn’t get on at first. There were some miscommunications and misunderstandings and it took us a little while to, well…see past those. To see each other.’

This, too, was close enough to the truth. Fitz can remember those early days of working at Flare all too well, how aloof Jemma had been and how uncomfortable he had felt. It makes him smile to realise how far they both have come.

‘Ah,’ Judy nods, ‘and then everything changed.’

‘Yes,’ Jemma says quietly, ‘I suppose it did.’

She turns towards him, and Fitz is struck by the honesty in her expression. She smiles, softly, and it exists only for him.

‘And now I can’t imagine my life without him in it.’

Fitz feels the truthfulness of these words. He had felt them in the long weekends in his apartment, wanting to text her and waiting for Mondays. He had felt them that night in Flare, when he’d been so aware he could lose her. He had felt them yesterday evening, when he’d fallen asleep on the sofa and she’d covered his knees with a blanket. When he tries to picture a life without Jemma, he only sees something empty. It ought to scare him, how quickly that has happened. But it doesn’t.

Filled with the sudden urge to communicate this to her, he leans over to wrap his arm about her waist. The fabric of her dress is slippery under his fingertips, but beneath it Fitz can feels the warmth of Jemma’s skin.

‘I feel the exact same way,’ he says, returning the smile.

Jemma’s eyes glow with happiness, and in that moment Fitz does the only thing he can think of to do. Bending his head, he brings his lips to hers and kisses her.

It is a light kiss, chaste and sweet, but as Jemma presses her palm to his cheek to prolong it, something passes through Fitz. It is the feeling that, like everything else they have done and said this evening, this is far more real than the charade it is meant to be.

It feels like an eon before they pull apart, but in truth it is a matter of seconds. Fitz meets Jemma’s gaze as her hand slips away, but for once he cannot read her expression. It seems to be telling him multiple things, all at once.

Across the table, Judy clears her throat. Fitz turns to her in surprise. He had almost forgotten she was there.

‘So,’ she says in an amused tone, ‘do we want dessert or not?’

Fitz leaves his arm on Jemma’s waist for the rest of the meal. She does not shrug him off, but rather leans into the touch, her shoulder resting against his own. It feels nice.

They only pull apart when they leave the restaurant and say their goodbyes to Judy. Fitz receives an embrace that is more of a press to the shoulders than anything else, but when it comes to Jemma, Judy looks at her very hard before pulling her into a close hug.

‘I love you very much,’ Fitz hears her say, brushing her fingers against Jemma’s hair. ‘You know that, don’t you?’

Jemma blinks, but quickly recovers herself.

‘Of course I do, Mum,’ she says reassuringly. ‘And I love you too.’

Judy climbs into her cab, throwing the two of them one last wave through the back window, and then she is gone. Jemma stares after her, her jacket pulled tight across her chest.

There is a strange charge to the air between them and Fitz wonders whether it has anything to do with their pretending to be a couple. Maybe Jemma hadn’t felt the same way he had when they’d kissed. Maybe she was upset with him for taking a liberty she hadn’t granted.

Hesitantly, Fitz steps up to her. He is about to broach the subject, apologise, and explain that it had felt like the natural thing a man in love might do, when he notices the tears shining in Jemma’s eyes.

‘Jemma? What is it?’

She shakes her head, reaching up to brush them away. ‘Oh, nothing. Nothing.’

‘You’re crying,’ Fitz points out gently. ‘Clearly it’s something.’

Jemma sighs. She is still gazing out into the traffic, following the route Judy’s cab had taken. ‘I know it sounds silly, but part of me wishes I had told her.’

Fitz frowns. ‘But I thought you didn’t want to worry her.’

‘I don’t,’ Jemma agrees. She lets go of her jacket so that her arms hang loosely by her sides. ‘But she’s still my mother. And as she was holding me just now, I wanted that feeling to last forever.’ She smiles, a little sadly. ‘I wanted to take a little bit of that comfort home.’

There is a lump in Fitz’s throat as they both fall silent, staring together into the night. If he was brave enough, he could tell her that he could offer her that comfort. If he was brave enough, he could simply reach out and hold her and never let her go.

If only, he thinks. If only he was brave enough.

Exhaling slowly, Fitz searches for Jemma’s hand. He finds it, and slips his fingers between hers. There is a familiarity to the motion now, a sense of ease with how they fit together. Jemma looks up at him with a mixture of surprise and weariness that Fitz can see goes right to her bones.

He nods his head in the direction of the car the valet has pulled around for them.

‘Come on,’ he says. ‘Let’s go home.’


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Fitz heaves a dramatic sigh. ‘Then, once more, I am sorry for misreading the date of your conference. I am sorry that the adjusted hotel booking I made is for tomorrow night instead of tonight and that they couldn’t bring it forward. And I am sorry that, because of this, we are having to spend the night in a nineteen-eighties-themed Bed and Breakfast.’ He glances across at her. ‘Have you forgiven me yet?’
> 
> She had forgiven him as soon as he’d told her about the mistake last night. But Jemma isn’t about to tell him that."
> 
> Nightmares and night time comforts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a content warning for nightmares and flashbacks in this chapter! there will be mentions of blood.

Jemma Simmons did not like to be confused. She didn’t like uncertainty and she didn’t like not knowing something for sure. She didn’t like to doubt herself or others, or to have to second guess everything they said. It made her feel vulnerable. This was highly inconvenient, because for the last few weeks Jemma has been stuck in an unending state of confusion.

And the worst of it was that she only had herself to blame.

‘How many times do I have to say that I’m sorry?’

In the passenger seat of the car, Jemma folds her arms and pretends to think. ‘Once more ought to do it.’

Fitz heaves a dramatic sigh. ‘Then, once more, I am sorry for misreading the date of your conference. I am sorry that the adjusted hotel booking I made is for tomorrow night instead of tonight and that they couldn’t bring it forward. And I am sorry that, because of this, we are having to spend the night in a nineteen-eighties-themed Bed and Breakfast.’ He glances across at her. ‘Have you forgiven me yet?’

She had forgiven him as soon as he’d told her about the mistake last night. But Jemma isn’t about to tell him that. She lifts one shoulder in a light shrug.

‘Ask me again when we get there. And actually, I don’t think it’s technically eighties themed. I think she just lives like that.’

Fitz groans. ‘Great.’

Sneaking a sideways look at him, Jemma experiences a rush of affection in her stomach. This is followed just as quickly by a wave of annoyance, because for the last few weeks it has been Fitz and her feelings towards him that have been the source of her confusion. And, despite the many hours she has spent agonizing, she still has no idea what to do about it.

It had begun the night they got home from dinner with her mother. Jemma’s mind had been so caught up in the melancholy feeling she’d experienced when Judy left that she hadn’t been thinking about anything else. She’d barely registered Fitz’s hand holding hers until they got home and suddenly it wasn’t anymore. She had felt the absence like a hole in the heart. Fitz had told her goodnight and she’d repeated the words back to him before stumbling to her bedroom in a daze.

For the rest of the night, she had lain awake, staring up at the ceiling. Snatches of memories replayed in front of her, from Fitz defending her to Judy to his arm circled comfortingly around her waist. She’d pressed her lips together, hoping to relive the feel of his kiss, but to no avail. The sun was beginning to come up, its weak yellow rays peeking through the curtains, before Jemma was willing to entertain the possibility that she wanted him to kiss her again.

To make matters even worse, Fitz was acting like the whole night had never happened. He never mentioned it, not even their kiss, and every time Jemma went to bring it up, she faltered. Fitz’s behaviour since that evening hadn’t changed. He was still her friend, but he had slipped seamlessly back into his professional role as her bodyguard. Her wellbeing was still his priority – but because it was his job. There wasn’t any other reason for it, and for her to put her feelings on him when he was already doing so much for her…Jemma couldn’t do it to him. It wouldn’t be fair.

And yet, try as she might, she couldn’t help feeling frustrated with him. How could he have been so unchanged by what they’d done that night? How could he have kissed her and then never given it a second thought?

Every so often, her irritation has flared and she has had to bite her lip to keep herself from snapping at him for something inconsequential. As hard as it feels in the moment, Jemma always manages it because what she’d said to him at the restaurant had been true. She couldn’t imagine her life without him in it.

She is dragged out of her thoughts by Fitz clicking on the indicator.

‘I think,’ he says reluctantly, ‘that we’re here.’

The Honeysuckle Cottage Bed and Breakfast was run from a red-brick bungalow, which was the furthest thing from a cottage Jemma had ever seen. The eighties décor begins from the moment she and Fitz enter through the front door. The hallway is papered from floor to ceiling with a chintzy floral print and the carpet is a plush pine green. A velour armchair sits in the corner, with a low pine desk in front of it on which sit several potted ferns.

Fitz drops his overnight bag on the floor and rubbed at their leaves experimentally.

‘Fake,’ he mouths.

Jemma throws him a look, and quickly motions him away from the desk as footsteps can be heard coming from the other room. A plump little woman with a perm straight out of the eighties she was so fond of appears in the hallway.

‘Ah.’ She beams at them both. ‘You must be the Fitzes.’

Jemma’s heart skips a beat. Her head shoots up, but before she can correct her, Fitz clears his throat.

‘Um, yes.’ He rubs the back of his neck. ‘That’s us.’

‘Wonderful! I’m Miss Sally and you’re both very welcome here at Honeysuckle. If I could just ask you to sign in…’

Their host presents them with a pink leather guestbook and a biro attached to it with a gold chain. Fitz takes the book first and buries his head in it, presumably to avoid the murderous glare Jemma is giving him. What on earth had possessed him to lie to Miss Sally? And about _this_ of all things!

When Fitz passes the book over to her, still ducking away from her gaze, Jemma hesitates only momentarily before defiantly signing herself in as _Jemma Fitz-Simmons_. Even if Fitz was so keen for her to take his last name tonight, that didn’t mean that she had to relinquish her own.

Miss Sally glances at the book as she places it back on the desk, and Jemma sees her raise her eyebrows. ‘How very modern.’

‘We try,’ Jemma says with a sweet smile. This time, it is Fitz’s eyes boring into the back of _her_ skull.

Miss Sally seems not to hear this last quip. She turns to take a key from a row of hooks hanging beneath a framed cross-stitch that reads “Home Sweet Home”.

‘Supper is served at six,’ she tells them, leading them out of the hallway. Jemma notices that the chintz stops once they leave, and is replaced with navy blue, mosaic-style wallpaper boarders. ‘And breakfast is at seven thirty. Lights out is at ten pm, sharp.’ She throws them a pointed look. ‘And I don’t want to hear no hanky panky either.’

‘Oh, don’t worry about that,’ Jemma chirps. ‘We always hanky panky at a moderate to low volume.’

Behind her, Fitz makes a choking noise.

‘Here we are.’

Miss Sally unlocks a door and throws it open to reveal a neat bedroom, similarly decked to the rest of the house. Jemma steps inside cautiously as Fitz takes the key that Miss Sally is holding out for him.

‘I’ll leave you to get settled in,’ she says, ‘and I’ll see you at six.’

The door swings shut behind her and Jemma waits until her footsteps have full fallen away before dropping her bag to the ground and crossing her arms.

‘At least I had the decency to ask before I started dating you.’

Fitz groans and slaps his hands over his eyes. ‘I know.’

‘You’ve just gone ahead and _married_ us! Without my permission!’

‘I know!’ Fitz removes his hands and looks at her reproachfully. ‘But you don’t have to sound so _repulsed_ at the idea of being married to me.’

The guilt in his eyes makes Jemma’s heart twinge, and her annoyance fades as fast as it had sprung up. She sighs. ‘I’m not repulsed by it. Of course I’m not. I just wish you’d told me in advance.’

‘I didn’t _know_ in advance,’ Fitz explains. He crosses the room to the large bed and sits on its end, his heels kicking its fabric skirt. The print, Jemma notes, matches the bedspread perfectly. ‘I had a suspicion that she assumed we were married when we were emailing, but I didn’t know for sure. And when she asked us just now, I just had a feeling that it would be safer to do it like this. She doesn’t feel as trustworthy as the hotel staff did.’

Jemma cannot argue with him on this. She sinks down onto the bed beside him and almost topples over. The mattress beneath them is so soft it could be made of marshmallow.

‘You’re probably right,’ she agrees. ‘And given her disapproval of me keeping my maiden name, I doubt she’d have liked the idea of unmarried people sharing a room anyway.’

Fitz snorts. ‘No. The fourth wave seems to have passed her right by, doesn’t it?’

‘Fitz, given the state of her house I highly doubt she even got on board with the _second_ wave.’

Meeting one another’s eye, they share a smirk. To Jemma, it feels like a realignment. Reaching over, she pats Fitz’s knee.

‘We’ll be fine here for the night,’ she says confidently. ‘All we have to do is get through dinner with Miss Sally and we’ll be out of here before breakfast for the conference. It’s nothing we can’t handle.’

Fitz pulls a face, but she can tell that behind his reticence he believes her.

‘What do you think she’s made for dinner?’ he asks.

Jemma scrunches up her nose. ‘Meatloaf.’

With a moan, Fitz flops back onto the bed. Laughing, Jemma follows him, and soon Fitz is laughing too, so much so that the whole bed is vibrating with the sound of it.

It is only when their laughter has subsided to low chuckles and they have turned to face one another on the bed that they realise the fairly large problem staring them both in the face. Jemma bites her lip, wondering what Fitz will suggest they do about it.

‘I’ll sleep on the floor,’ he says immediately. ‘Like you say, it’s only for one night. And seeing as it’s my fault we’re here in the first place, I kind of deserve it.’

‘Yes,’ Jemma agrees, ‘you do.’

But as Fitz nods, climbing off the bed to pick up his bag, she cannot help entertaining the possibility of them sharing the bed. It is certainly large enough – neither of them are particularly wide or tall. And she knows how grumpy he gets when he hasn’t had his eight hours. Jemma tries to keep her heart from thumping as she imagines having Fitz fall sleep beside her. She takes a deep breath.

‘Fitz?’

‘Hmm?’ He glances at her over his shoulder. ‘You okay?’

Jemma nods, and pats the left-hand side pillow. ‘You take that side. I’ll sleep on this one.’

Fitz looks as if he wants to protest but Jemma can see the hopefulness in his eyes. ‘Seriously? You wouldn’t mind?’

She shakes her head. ‘Consider yourself one hundred per cent forgiven.’

Fitz’s face breaks into a relieved grin and Jemma feels her insides twist. ‘Thanks, Jemma.’

He turns back to his bag, rummaging through it for his toothbrush, while Jemma allows her thoughts to carry her away. Maybe, she thinks, tonight will be just what she needs to decide her feelings once and for all. Maybe Fitz will dribble in his sleep. Maybe he will have really bad morning breath. Or maybe they will wake up with their limbs entwined, their breathing low, and their hearts beating out the same rhythm.

‘Oh my god,’ Fitz’s voice floats through from the bathroom in horror, ‘Jemma, look at this. It’s an avocado bath suite.’

Suppressing a groan, Jemma falls back onto the bed and covers her eyes.

It was going to be a long night.

The nightmare comes to her suddenly and unexpectedly. It has been so long since she’d dreamt it in full and as she falls asleep to the sound of Fitz’s light snores Jemma forgets to put her guard up. Her eyes shut and she slips into it before she can do anything to stop herself.

She is in her office at Flare, making her way through a mountain of paperwork. Jemma can remember exactly what she was working on that night, but in her dreamscape the papers in front of her blur together. Try as she might she can’t make them out.

A muffled noise from outside her door makes her start but she doesn’t get up, even though she is screaming at herself to. She knows what this dream is now and she is desperate to put a stop to it but her movements feel laboured, like she is wading through water. Another sound, a more deliberate one, finally sets her in motion. She pushes back her chair and gets to her feet, reaching for the door handle. It passes through her fingers like smoke.

From behind the door, she hears someone speak. _Hello? Can I help you?_ The voice is indistinct, existing only within her dream, but Jemma knows that it is Lucas. Those were the last words he ever said. A wave of panic seizes her and she grabs for the door. No. No, she can’t let it happen again.

But the door isn’t made of anything solid and the shot rings out anyway. Jemma screams and suddenly the door gives way and the scene before her is as fresh in her mind as if it had happened yesterday.

Lucas on the floor in a pool of scarlet, groaning. The figure in black standing over him. The second shot, the third, the silence that follows. The figure bends down and takes off his mask but the details of his face are hazy, as they always are in her dream. He escapes her here and it feels like a taunt.

Usually, this is the part of the dream where he sees her. Usually, this is the part where he lifts his gun again. Usually, her nightmare ends here. But tonight, it doesn’t. Tonight, the figure vanishes and Jemma is left alone with Lucas’s body. Except that she isn’t sure it belongs to him anymore.

Jemma’s feet move of their own accord, pushing her forward until she is standing over the body.

No. No no no no no no no.

Fitz’s lifeless eyes stare back up at her.

A movement on the other side of the bed wakes Fitz, dragging him out of the rather pleasant sleep he’d fallen into.

He’d been nervous about sleeping in the same bed as Jemma at first, but once they’d said goodnight and their lights were out – at ten pm, sharp – he’d found himself relaxing. Jemma’s breathing was even and she made the bed smell like lavender bodywash. Before long, he’d drifted off.

But now he is awake, blinking groggily as he tries to remember where he is. Peering through the darkness, he can just make out a fringed lamp, garish chintz wallpaper, and Jemma’s glasses perched on the bedside table.

Fitz’s heart skips a beat.

_Jemma_.

Her side of the bed is empty, and Fitz pushes himself up onto his elbow to search for her. He doesn’t have to look very far. She is sitting on the edge of the bed, her shoulders hunched over and her head drooped forward. Swallowing down his relief, Fitz switches on the bedside light and sees her flinch.

‘Hey,’ he says in a low voice. ‘Are you okay?’

‘Mmm.’ Jemma nods, shooting him a quick smile over her shoulder. She has her forefinger in her mouth and is nibbling at her nail. ‘I’m fine.’

It’s an unconvincing picture, so Fitz pushes back the quilted satin bedspread. He climbs over the bed to sit next to her, close enough that he can feel her warmth but still leaving her enough space. He clasps his hands loosely together and waits.

A few moments pass, during which they sit together quietly, before Jemma sighs. ‘It was a bad dream,’ she murmurs.

Fitz’s chest goes tight. Having slept in the room next to hers for the last few months, he is not unaware that Jemma sometimes has disturbed nights. Sometimes, he will hear her door open and her feet pad across the wood floor to the kitchen. Others, she will stay in her room but he will hear creaks as she paces back and forth, stands up and sits down. He had never found the courage to ask her about it and now he wishes he had.

‘Do you want to talk about it?’

Jemma shudders. ‘No. Thank you, but no.’

Fitz is alarmed to find that she is shivering, her fingers trembling as they sit in her lap. Slipping off the bed, he walks over to the wardrobe and takes a blanket from the pile Miss Sally has left stacked inside. He drapes it around Jemma’s shoulders and she looks up at him with watery eyes as she pulls it tight.

‘It was about that night,’ she whispers.

Fitz sits back down, a heaviness in his bones. She never spoke openly about the night of the first break in, the night that Lucas James had died in front of her. It got mentioned in passing sometimes, but she never voluntarily brought it up. Because of this, Fitz thinks with a twinge of guilt, it had been too easy for him to forget that going through something like that changed you. You carried it with you, wherever you went.

‘They’re always about that night,’ Jemma says. ‘But this one…this one was different. It was…it was…’ She trails off, with a shake of her head.

Fitz doesn’t push her. As much as he wants to lessen the pain she is feeling, he knows that the effort of sharing it sometimes hurt just as much. Instead, he tells her something he’s wanted to say for a very long time.

‘You’re really brave, Jemma. You know that, right?’

She stares at him then, in a small voice, says, ‘what?’

‘You’re brave,’ Fitz repeats, hearing the warmth in his words. ‘One of the bravest people I know, actually. The way that you’re dealing with all of this,’ he gestures to the room at large, hoping she will understand his meaning, ‘and still managing to smile and be kind and do right by others is amazing.’ He shrugs. ‘I don’t know many people who could be that brave.’

Jemma takes a moment to absorb this, swaying slightly where she sits.

‘But I didn’t do anything,’ she says, her eyes filling with tears. ‘I was there when he died and I didn’t do anything.’

Fitz shakes his head. ‘But you _are_. You’re fighting for him. You’re going to get him justice. And you – _we_ – are going to make sure that whoever hurt him doesn’t get to hurt anyone else. I made you a promise, remember?’

Jemma looks at him, and Fitz can see her start to believe.

‘Yes,’ she whispers, ‘yes, you did.’

They share a smile. With a deep sigh, Jemma leans into his side and Fitz shifts on the bed to accommodate her. Her head fits under his chin and his arm loops around her waist the same way it had at the restaurant. It feels just as right here, in the middle of the night with no pretence between them, as it had then.

Moving his head slightly, Fitz rests it on top of Jemma’s. He can feel a wet patch appearing on the sleeve of his t-shirt where she has dried her eyes, but he doesn’t mind. He doesn’t mind anything, as long as she feels safe.

Be this as it may, before long he feels himself start to shiver. Jemma must feel the tremors too, because she looks up with concern.

‘Now you’re cold too,’ she says, clucking her teeth. Peeling the blanket from her shoulders, she tugs it around the two of them so that Fitz is enveloped in it too. ‘There,’ she says softly.

Fitz pulls on the blanket. It smells, ever so slightly, of the same warm scent Jemma herself holds. He feels a wave of unspeakable tenderness for her and how, even in this moment, she still makes the time to take care of others. She has taken care of him, he realises, just as much as he has taken care of her.

‘Thanks, Jemma,’ Fitz says, before nudging her shoulder. ‘But, uh, seeing as we’re both cold now, what would you say to going back to bed?’

She scrunches up her nose and it makes his breath catch in his throat. ‘Well, yes. I suppose that would work instead.’

They both crawl back beneath Miss Sally’s bedspread and Fitz switches out the light. He hears Jemma exhale shakily and her fingers touch his in the dark.

‘Fitz?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Could you hold my hand? Just,’ her voice quivers, ‘just until I fall asleep.’

‘Yeah.’ Fitz can barely produce more than a whisper. ‘Of course I can.’

He folds their fingers together on the pillow, feeling the jump of her pulse through feather light skin. He holds her hand until her breathing falls even, and then he holds it for just a little bit more.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "For the last two days Fitz and Jemma have been hiding from the storm in plain sight. They watch it through the large windows of Jemma’s apartment with steaming cups of tea fogging up the glass. They watch the clouds roll in like waves on a dark sea, shiver in sympathy with the chill wind, and listen to the rain hit with such force and such speed that it becomes a kind of white noise. For the last two days, they have seen no one else and spoken to no one else, and Fitz is beginning to realise that it is just as well he likes Jemma as much as he does. If he didn’t, he thinks he might start to go mad."
> 
> Tempests and truths.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i almost went back and gave all my chapters titles from taylor swift lyrics just so i could title this one 'my heart, my hips, my body, my love (my time, my wine, my spirit, my trust)'. so...there's that. enjoy?

_‘In other news, the city continues to be rocked by the biggest storm to hit this side of the coast in decades. Unprecedented for this time of the summer, wind speeds are expected to reach sixty miles per hour and meteorologists have warned that heavy rain will turn into hail by late afternoon. Emergency services are recommending that those who can stay home, stay home…’_

The storm has been raging for three days.

It had begun as most storms do, with a gentle pattering of rain on the window-panes and the smell of salt in the air, like the sea was issuing a warning. Then, the wind had picked up and the sky grew dark and the rain fell harder. Soon, the roads were flooded ankle-deep and gales were blowing so hard they stole your breath. It was August, but the storm had made the month unrecognisable.

You couldn’t escape it, no matter where you hid.

After the first day of the storm, when employees had staggered into the building half-drowned and shivering, Daisy had made the decision to close Flare until it ended. Those who could work from home could, those who couldn’t would be paid as if they were.

So, for the last two days Fitz and Jemma have been hiding from the storm in plain sight. They watch it through the large windows of Jemma’s apartment with steaming cups of tea fogging up the glass. They watch the clouds roll in like waves on a dark sea, shiver in sympathy with the chill wind, and listen to the rain hit with such force and such speed that it becomes a kind of white noise. For the last two days, they have seen no one else and spoken to no one else, and Fitz is beginning to realise that it is just as well he likes Jemma as much as he does. If he didn’t, he thinks he might start to go mad.

‘How long do you think it will last for?’

He and Jemma are sitting on the floor by the window. The radio is playing in the background, the local news giving hourly updates on traffic disruption, fallen trees, and road closures. Jemma could quite easily have tuned into the presenter’s voice for an answer to her question, but instead she has asked him.

Fitz shrugs. ‘Not sure. Until the next weather front moves in, I suppose.’

‘Hmm.’ Jemma has her knees tucked into her chest and her chin resting on them. ‘I hope it comes soon.’

She looks beautiful like that and Fitz would like to tell her so. In order to stop himself, he jokes, ‘had enough of me already, have you?’

‘Oh, completely. You’re the most annoying person I’ve ever met.’ They share a chuckle, then Jemma grows serious. ‘But really, Fitz, I don’t think I could ever have enough of you.’

She touches his shoulder as she gets to her feet, and Fitz feels his stomach flutter. He sucks in a deep breath.

Of course, the problem with liking Jemma as much as he does is that he likes her as much as he does.

There is a thick layer of glass between them and the storm, but it feels to Fitz like there is something brewing inside the apartment too. More specifically, inside him. He has been able to feel it for a while now, but knows that it has probably been building for longer than that. Perhaps from the first time he’d touched Jemma’s hand.

The life of a bodyguard, Fitz knows, is a life lived on a knife’s edge. You had to be close to your mark, but not too close. You had to know them, but there was an invisible line that you could never cross. He’d crossed it once before and promised Mack he wouldn’t make the same mistake twice. But, with every smile Jemma gives him, Fitz can feel himself creeping ever closer to that edge.

As he watches her ponytail swing across her back as she makes her way to the kitchen, he suddenly finds himself echoing her hope that the next weather front will arrive soon.

‘I was thinking I would make stir fry for dinner,’ Jemma calls. She has taken a chopping board from the side and vegetables from the fridge. She pulls a face, wrinkling her nose. ‘I know Friday is usually our takeaway night, but I don’t want to make any delivery service come out unnecessarily…’

‘No,’ Fitz agrees, ‘and stir fry sounds good.’ He gets to his feet, padding across the floorboards to join her. ‘Can I help?’

Jemma’s face brightens and she nods, passing him a bag of bean sprouts and a colander. ‘Could you wash these please?’

For a while, they work together in compatible silence, punctuated only by a particularly hard hammering of rain on the windows or a favourite song on the radio. Fitz quickly falls into step with Jemma’s kitchen rhythm, stepping aside to let her get to the sink or passing her a knife that she doesn’t yet know she needs. He has often helped her out with meals without a second thought, but this evening he finds that he is hyperaware of his every move.

He is aware of how easily he can find what he wants in the cupboards, and how he knows exactly which knife cuts bell peppers best. He is aware of Jemma by his side, and how familiar her body feels next to his as she marinades chicken and tells him to warm some plates in the oven. He is aware of how settled he feels and how, if he let himself, he could label that feeling as _home_.

Usually, they eat by the breakfast bar or on the cosy sofas but tonight Jemma carries her plate over to the large oak dining table by the windows. Fitz follows her curiously, but soon realises why she has done it. From here, they have a bird’s eye view of the storm settling in for the night.

‘It doesn’t look like we’re moving out of this weather front any time soon,’ she remarks, swirling her chopsticks through her noodles.

‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Fitz shrugs. ‘A lot can happen overnight.’

‘Mmm, that’s true.’ Jemma smiles at him and nods towards his bowl of stir fry. ‘Hey, what do you think? I tried a new ingredient.’

Fitz takes a mouthful of food, allowing the warm tang of the sauce to roll on his tongue, recognising the sweetness in the marinade. He closes his eyes in appreciation. ‘Delicious. What is it?’

‘Plum sauce.’ He can hear the pride in Jemma’s voice. ‘I’m glad you like it.’

All of a sudden, the sweetness turns sour in his mouth. Fitz swallows guiltily, wondering if Jemma is aware of how often in the midst of all this domesticity he almost forgets the real reason he is in her life. He clears his throat and decides to remind them both.

‘So, um, seeing as we’re here, I thought it might be a good idea to talk about something important tonight. Something that I think we should have talked about a while ago.’

Jemma’s chopsticks slip from her fingers, in an unusual failure of dexterity. ‘Oh?’ she says, her voice an octave higher than usual. She starts to fumble with her napkin to clear up the dropped sauce. ‘And what…what’s that then?’

‘You and Daisy have a press conference for Sunburst in two weeks,’ Fitz says. ‘I know we usually only plan things a week in advance, but this is a big event. I think we need to put a bit more thought into it, especially co-ordination with the venue staff.’

‘Oh.’ Jemma seems a little disappointed, but he can’t understand why. ‘I see.’ She places her chopsticks on the newly cleaned table. ‘What did you have in mind?’

Fitz starts to explain his plans for the conference and about the best security measures to put in place. Every so often, Jemma nods to let him know that she is listening but Fitz can tell that her mind is elsewhere. He had hoped that discussion of work, both his and hers and the places where they overlapped, would ground the evening but somehow it seemed to have done the opposite.

‘Of course,’ he finishes limply, ‘this is all hypothetical. I’ll have to speak to Elena about it on Monday and we’ll make the arrangements together.’

‘Mmm.’ Jemma’s chopsticks are still lying on the table and her bowl is hardly touched. ‘Alright.’

Determined not to be put off, Fitz tries again. ‘Is there, um, anything else you think we should talk about?’

Jemma lifts her head. ‘Yes,’ she says, suddenly. ‘Why haven’t we talked about our kiss?’

Fitz freezes. A wave of heat crashes over his body as the memory of her lips on his springs to his mind uninvited. It tongue-ties him, and makes him stutter.

‘Why…why haven’t we…what?’

‘Why,’ Jemma asks, with only the slightest quiver to her voice, ‘haven’t we talked about it? We went out to dinner with my mother, we pretended to be a couple, and you kissed me. It happened weeks ago and we still haven’t talked about it.’

Fitz can feel his heart pounding against his chest. Abruptly, he gets to his feet and picks up their bowls. ‘I think I’m done. Are you done?’ he asks, already stacking their plates together, ‘you haven’t eaten much.’

He turns his back on her to head to the kitchen.

‘Urgh, Fitz!’ He hears the scrape of Jemma’s chair as she pushes it back from the table. ‘Why don’t you want to talk about this?’

‘Why,’ he retorts, ‘are you so desperate to?’ He drops the bowls on the sideboard and turns to her. ‘Why was it any different to us pretending to be married when we stayed at that B&B? Or when we shared the bed?’

Even as he says it, he knows that it is a lame argument. Waking up with Jemma in his arms, snoring softly as her hair tickled his neck, had reduced his heart to the same state of longing that kissing her had. Jemma grasps onto this immediately.

‘Now that you mention it, I don’t think it was!’ She steps towards him, her chest heaving and her eyes alight. ‘We haven’t talked about any of it, but we should have. We should have, because they’re important, Fitz. They’ve changed everything.’

Panic seizes Fitz as he realises she is right.

‘No,’ he says, ‘no, they don’t have to.’

‘But they have,’ Jemma says. All of a sudden, her voice softened. ‘Haven’t they?’

She is standing right in front of him, close enough for him to see the freckles on her cheeks. There is an openness to her face that, with one glance, Fitz knows he won’t be able to resist. He can’t lie to her anymore, not when she is looking at him like that. Not when he feels the way he does.

‘I didn’t want us to talk about the kiss,’ he says, ‘because I knew what would come next if we did.’

‘What?’ Jemma asks. ‘What would come next?’

She is so beautiful like this, her eyes so bright and her heart so bold. She is so beautiful, and Fitz slips off the knife edge.

‘I’d want to do it again.’

Jemma sucks in a sharp breath, as though his words are a key and they have turned a lock inside her chest. Emotion floods her face and Fitz watches a decision take place behind her eyes. The whole world seems to fall away, crumbling around them, as she steps forward.

When she takes his face in her hands, gently tugging him forward to meet her, Fitz closes his eyes and lets Jemma kiss him.

Her lips are soft, tinged with the sweetness both of the plum sauce and something entirely her own. They press against his with purpose, as though they have imagined this moment more times than it is possible to count. Fitz’s heart beats louder as he tastes her mutual desire and he surges forward to kiss her back.

Jemma’s hands move upwards, twisting themselves through his hair, as he pulls her close. Fitz’s own hands move from her waist to her back to her shoulder-blades, unable to lie still. He kisses her again and again, revelling in the way the shape of her mouth seems to fit with his. It makes him feel like a fuller version of himself.

‘Fitz,’ Jemma whispers, her breath hot and wet on his lips. Her forehead rolls against his and already Fitz misses the feel of her kiss.

Her hand slips to the back of his neck and his fall to her hips. With a soft grunt, Fitz lifts her up onto the granite worktop of the kitchen island, sitting her just above his eyeline. Jemma’s fingers trace his jawline tenderly, as though she is sketching out a portrait of him in her heart. She smiles, and for a moment it looks like she is about to speak.

But then, enough breath back in her lungs, she leans forward again and Fitz meets her halfway.

In this moment in the fading light, with chapped lips and the white noise of the rain falling hard against the window-panes, he can pretend that they are the only two people to exist and that the rest of the world has gone away.

They fall asleep on one of the cranberry-coloured sofas, their limbs tangled together and their hands entwined. Fitz wakes up first, with a dull ache in his head that he knows is the dawning of cold, hard clarity.

With painstaking precision, he extricates himself from Jemma’s arms and climbs off the sofa. The sight of her, sleeping so soundly, gives him pause and he stops for a moment to sit on the coffee table and catch his breath.

Jemma’s chest rises and falls, her fingers still clutching at the space where he had so recently lain. There is a loose strand of hair falling on her face which Fitz brushes to one side, tucking the blanket tighter about her.

He wishes with all his heart that there was a way for him to tell her that he doesn’t regret what has happened between them. He wants her to have that knowledge to hold onto, no matter what comes next.

Fitz’s arms and legs feel heavy as he gets up from the coffee table. He moves towards his own room, knowing that there is a phone call he has to make.

He hadn’t meant to fall in love with Jemma Simmons. But he has, and, as usual, she is right. It has changed everything.

The first thing Jemma notices as she wakes is that the rain has stopped. The steady thrumming against the window that has been the soundtrack to her last three days has ceased, leaving her head feeling clearer, refreshed. She breathes in the quiet, letting it fill her lungs.

As the fog of sleep leaves her, memories of the night before come flooding back. Her bold question at the dining table. Fighting with Fitz in the kitchen. How he’d said he wanted to kiss her again. How she’d kissed him, and he’d kissed her, and she had hoped they would never have to stop.

Grinning to herself, Jemma bites her lip and turns to press her face into the couch cushions. 

Of all the possible reasons she’d thought of for why Fitz had ignored their kiss at the restaurant, this was one that she’d never dared to hope for. He hadn’t wanted to talk about it because he’d wanted to do it again. He cared about her, more than a friend would, more than a bodyguard would. He reciprocated her feeling that there was something else between them, something special.

Jemma remembers the way his mouth had felt on hers and how alive it had made her feel. A thrill of delight runs down her spine. It was almost too good to be true.

With this thought ringing in her mind, she wriggles her hand out of the blanket and gives herself a firm pinch to the forearm. She isn’t dreaming, and her eyes fly open with a gasp from the pain. It is only then that she realises she is alone on the sofa. Fitz is gone.

Jemma knows that he’d been there when she’d fallen asleep because he had slipped into slumber first. She’d watched his eyelids slowly close and felt his breathing grow shallow. He’d looked so peaceful lying there and she’d watched him for a long time, her attention for once unbridled, until she’d sunk into sleep too. But now she is awake again, and the space beside her is cold. Fitz hasn’t been there for a long time.

Pushing the blanket from her shoulders, Jemma struggles off the sofa.

‘Fitz?’

Her apartment is filled with the cool, blue light of the dawn. She shivers – the rain might have stopped, but it has left an unmistakable chill to the summer morning. Jemma turns, thinking to check Fitz’s room for him first, then stops dead in her tracks.

She doesn’t need to find Fitz. He is still here, sitting by her front door with his suitcase beside him, which he accidentally kicks in his haste to get to his feet when he sees her.

‘Jemma,’ he says, and already it sounds like an apology.

Jemma steps towards him warily. Not only does he have his suitcase packed, but he is wearing his jacket and twisting his car keys anxiously in his hand. There is a sinking feeling in her chest and she shakes her head.

‘What are you doing?’

‘I’ve taken care of everything,’ Fitz says, ‘so you don’t need to worry. I’ve called Mack and he’s sending a replacement. She’ll be here soon. I’ll wait with you until she comes.’

_A replacement_. The words echo through Jemma’s mind. She shakes her head.

‘I don’t understand. You’re leaving?’

‘Her name’s Piper,’ Fitz continues, looking anywhere but at her. ‘She’s good, one of the best. I’ve already passed on your agenda to her and explained how the system works. She’ll carry it on. She’ll take care of you.’

_But I thought you’d promised to do that_. Jemma swallows back the question bitterly. Her eyes are starting to prick with tears.

‘Fitz, what’s happened? Why…why are you doing this?’

Fitz lets out a long sigh, before glancing, fleetingly, up at the ceiling. Then, at last he meets her eye.

‘I promised Mack that if I took this job, I wouldn’t make any mistakes. That I would be careful. But I have made a mistake, and it’s a big one. And now, I…I have to fix it.’

‘A mistake?’ Jemma repeats thickly.

He can only be referring to last night, to the way that she’d kissed him and he’d let her. It makes her heart hurt to know that’s what he thinks about it. She thinks back, searching her mind for some sign she’d missed that he’d been uncomfortable, that he hadn’t wanted it as much as she had. She comes up blank, her head filled only with tender touches and urgent kisses.

It doesn’t make sense. How could something that had felt so right to her feel so wrong to him?

‘Yeah.’ Fitz’s shoulders lift and fall in a semblance of a shrug.

Jemma wants to turn back time. She wants to go back to the night before, prove to him with her hands and her lips that she is the opposite of a mistake. She wants to go back further, to the first time they’d met, so she could tell him from the beginning how much he is going to mean to her. She wants to stop this moment in its tracks and rewrite it into something better.

‘But you promised,’ she whispers, her voice breaking. ‘You promised that we’d do this together.’

There is still so long to go before the trial begins. She doesn’t want to have to do it without him.

Fitz looks pained, his hands now hanging loose by his sides. There is defeat in his eyes, as though he has succumbed to something inevitable.

‘I know,’ he says with difficulty. ‘I know I did. But it’s…it’s better this way.’

Jemma is about to scoff, to argue that there is no universe where him leaving her is better than him staying, when something stops her. All of a sudden, the memory of the dream she’d had at Honeysuckle Cottage comes back to her, vivid in her mind. She sees Fitz’s face as she’d seen it in the nightmare, his eyes wide and lifeless, blood soaking through his shirt, and it scares her just as much as it had that night.

His job is a dangerous one, she knows that, has always known that. Fitz has always made very little of it, but Jemma has always had an awareness of it, of the ever present danger. He put himself in harm’s way every day in an attempt to keep her out of it. How long could that go on until he got hurt in place of her?

‘Yes,’ she hears herself saying, ‘maybe you’re right.’

Fitz looks surprised, even a little disappointed.

‘What?’

‘I think you’re right,’ Jemma repeats, crossing her arms over her chest. The back of her throat burns. ‘And it will be better this way.’

Fitz has the audacity to frown, as though he is the one who has the right to feel hurt. He opens his mouth, about to speak again, when his phone buzzes in his hand, making them both jump. Fitz glances at it, before looking up at her.

‘It’s Piper. She’s downstairs.’

‘Well,’ Jemma says, ‘you’d better get going, then.’

Fitz hesitates, apparently reluctant now that he has come so close to leaving altogether.

‘Jemma…’ he begins, but the words he’d been meaning to say trail away and no others come to take their place. He bites his lip, picks up his suitcase, and walks out of the door. It closes, softly, behind him.

Once he is gone, Jemma drifts to the window, to the place where they had sat together only the night before. Sinking to the ground, she watches Fitz greet a woman on the steps that she assumes must be Piper. Piper walks inside, and Fitz moves to his car. Jemma holds her breath, waiting, but he never looks up. He drives away without a second glance. She bends over the glass and is startled to see small droplets covering it. It has started raining again. The storm, it seems, isn’t over after all.


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "He misses Jemma. Every atom of him aches with how much he misses her, despite knowing that he has no right to feel that way. After all, it had been his decision to go, even if she’d agreed that it was the right thing to do. The memory of how she’d acted at their parting stings Fitz’s pride even from the distance of a fortnight. He’d been prepared for how hard it would be to leave her. He just hadn’t been prepared for how easily she would let him go."
> 
> Now or never (and how close they come to never).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry for leaving this on such a cliffhanger for so long! i started writing something else and got very distracted by it. i should be posting it by the end of the week, so if you're enjoying this you might like that too?
> 
> hope this chapter gives enough drama and mends the hearts hurt by chapter 10!

The auditorium is vast, with high ceilings and a tall stage. Rows of seating line the hall, ending about half-way back, and booths sit in a semi-circle in the rest of the space. As she and Daisy are led down the aisles by the event coordinator, Elena and Piper following behind them, Jemma finds her gaze flitting back and forth across the room, searching out all possible entrances and exits. It is a trick she has seen Fitz do a dozen times and somewhere along the way she has begun to do it herself, a kind of backseat bodyguarding.

_Fitz_. Catching herself too late, Jemma bites down hard on her lip. She had promised herself this morning that today would finally be the day that she didn’t think of him. It has been two weeks since he’d walked out, and try as she might not a day has gone past that Jemma hasn’t thought of him, hasn’t missed him. Today was too important for Flare for her to get maudlin so she’d been intent on keeping him out of her mind. She is disappointed at herself for falling at the first hurdle.

Determined to get back on track, Jemma tosses her hair over her shoulder and tunes back into the event coordinator’s words.

‘There will be security guards in every wing,’ he is saying, ‘no one gets onto that stage unless they’re authorised too. And anyone coming into the auditorium will be subject to a full body scan and asked for their ID and ticket before being allowed entrance.’

Over his shoulder, Jemma can see Daisy watching her carefully. She smiles, hoping to convince her that she has nothing to worry about, that she is fine. Daisy’s eyebrows knit with suspicion, but she looks away. Jemma’s shoulders sink with relief. Over the last two weeks, she has done everything she can to divert Daisy from finding out her true feelings, putting on a brave face every time she was in the office and trying to act as if nothing had changed. She doesn’t want Daisy to know how much she is hurting. That is, if Daisy doesn’t already know.

‘We’ve done a bomb sweep already this morning,’ the event coordinator continues, ‘and we’re about to carry out another one before the press conference begins this afternoon.’

Beside Daisy, Elena nods approvingly. ‘Can we supervise?’

‘Of course.’ He holds out his arm, gesturing to the stage. ‘If you’re ready now…?’

With a quick glance at Daisy for her approval, Elena steps forward to follow him. Piper appears at Jemma’s elbow.

‘I should probably go with her,’ she says decisively, then immediately wavers. ‘Unless, of course, you want me to stay? I could stay.’

Jemma shakes her head. ‘No,’ she says, ‘no, Piper, you’d better go. Daisy and I will be just fine for a minute or two.’

Piper smiles and nods, before turning to stride purposefully after Elena. Jemma watches her go with a strange vacancy.

She likes Piper, really she does. It would be impossible not to like her. Piper is even-tempered, full of energy, and dedicated to detail. She gets on with everyone at Flare and does her job diligently and without complaint. She is also the model house guest, never leaving her light on past eleven o’clock and always cleaning the shower after she has used it. She makes her own meals, leaving Jemma to cook and eat hers alone, chewing slowly as she stares out of the window at the city below.

In almost every way, Piper was the perfect protection officer, but. The _but_ that springs to Jemma’s mind is greater than the sum of its parts.

Piper is perfect, except that she isn’t Fitz.

Jemma is annoyed with herself when she realises that she has now thought of him twice in less than five minutes, and then her annoyance shifts to Fitz for insisting on filling her mind so even after he’d left her. It doesn’t seem fair that she misses him as much as she does, and yet she can’t help it. It feels like there is a void in her life, a space by her side that is constantly empty. She wonders if any part of Fitz feels the same way.

Daisy steps towards her, their shoulders brushing.

‘It’s not too late,’ she says. ‘If you want to go home, I’ve got this.’

Jemma blinks at her incredulously. ‘Why on earth would I go home? I’m completely safe here, you know that. Elena and Piper aren’t going to let anything happen.’

Daisy shrugs. ‘I do know that. All I’m just saying is, if you don’t want to be here, it’s okay. I get it.’

She gives Jemma a meaningful look that confirms Jemma’s suspicion that her friend knows exactly how she feels about Fitz being gone. Swallowing hard, Jemma shakes her head.

‘I’m fine, Daisy,’ she says softly. ‘And I want to be here. We’ve worked so hard on Sunburst together it feels only right. I’m here to support you and to celebrate what Flare has achieved.’

Reaching out, she squeezes Daisy’s hand to demonstrate this, despite the fact that she feels far less confident than her words and action suggests. In the five years she has been deputy CEO of Flare, Jemma has attended far fewer press conferences and conventions than Daisy has. Her place, the place she felt most comfortable, was in the development labs within Flare’s walls, not on a stage blinking in harsh lights as she was bombarded with questions. Daisy always dealt with that, while Jemma ran things on the ground.

For days, her anxiety over today has done battle with her loneliness in order to keep her up at night. But when she is sitting in her chair and the applause has died down and her eyes have adjusted to the spotlight, Jemma finds herself beginning to relax. It is easy for her to speak about the Sunburst range with enthusiasm, easy to talk passionately about a project that has been so close to her heart for so long. She rambles about the tidal powered severs in the distribution centre for so long that the panel host has to politely cut her off.

When the press conference finishes, it feels like it has barely begun. Relief washes over Jemma, making her legs wobble as she climbs down from the stage, the heat of the lights fading from her skin.

Daisy squeezes her shoulder.

‘Great job,’ she says, ‘but did you really have to talk so much about the tidal servers?’

There is a glint in her eyes, and Jemma is about to scoff and tease her about her chronic hair-tossing under the spotlight, when Daisy’s attention is pulled away. She turns to autograph some groupie’s phone case with a purple sharpie and a radiant smile.

Jemma lingers for a moment, but no one asks her to do the same. She becomes aware of an uncomfortable pressing in her bladder, the result of hours of pent up tension. Glancing around her, Jemma searches for Piper, but her bodyguard has vanished from sight, probably doing another sweep of the perimeter. Piper was nothing if not thorough.

Pursing her lips in frustration, Jemma tries to remember where the ladies bathroom was. She’d seen it on the way to the auditorium, as the event coordinator had swept her and Daisy along the corridor. It wasn’t far away. She could be there and back before anyone realised she was gone.

There is an emergency exit to her right, leading out of the auditorium to the quiet of the hallway beyond. Making sure that no one is watching her, Jemma pushes it open and quietly slips outside.

Once she finds the ladies, with its tiled walls and patchouli soap in porcelain dispensers, it is very tempting to stay there for the rest of the afternoon. But, as Jemma rubs her hands under the dryer, she knows that this is a futile idea. While the worst of the day might be over, she still has hours of demonstrations left to go before she can go home. She has been gone from the auditorium for too long anyway – Piper or Elena is probably already out looking for her.

Sighing, Jemma brushes the last of the dampness off her hands on her skirt. It is time to head back.

She walks out of the ladies and almost immediately collides with someone coming the other way. They barge into her, throwing their whole weight against her, so that she staggers back against the wall. Something hits her, hard, in the middle of her belly and the blow knocks all the breath from Jemma’s body.

Then the pressure on her front lifts as the person who’d knocked into her rights themselves, Jemma catches a glimpse of their face. A flicker of recognition sparks in her mind, but it fades before she can grasp hold of it and place them. The figure turns, and she is vaguely aware of them running off in the opposite direction.

Jemma pushes herself off the wall but leaves a steadying hand there to help her keep her balance. How rude, she thinks, to punch someone in the stomach and not even pause to say sorry.

She tries to step forward, but a heavy, woozy feeling comes over her, radiating out from her middle. Jemma has never been punched before and she is a little surprised at how much it hurts, how sick it makes her feel. She puts her hand to her stomach and her eyes widen. Her fingers come away soaked with blood.

Jemma staggers back against the wall. She wants to cry out, but finds that her tongue has locked, her jaw melded shut. No words come out, no matter how hard she tries. The world spins as she sinks to the ground, no longer stable on its axis.

From somewhere far away, Jemma thinks that she hears someone shout. But then the buzzing in her ears grows too loud and the pain in her middle too much and the blackness at the edge of her vision tips her over into a world where she can hear nothing at all.

Fitz is moping in bed when he gets the call.

He has spent a lot of time there during the last two weeks. In fact, other than obligatory food shops, he has barely left his flat. He moves from the kitchen to the sofa to his bed and back to the kitchen, in a lonely circuit that he doesn’t know how to break.

He misses Jemma. Every atom of him aches with how much he misses her, despite knowing that he has no right to feel that way. After all, it had been his decision to go, even if she’d agreed that it was the right thing to do. The memory of how she’d acted at their parting stings Fitz’s pride even from the distance of a fortnight. He’d been prepared for how hard it would be to leave her. He just hadn’t been prepared for how easily she would let him go.

He reaches for his ringing phone, fully prepared to silence it and return his head to his pillow to wallow in his hurt feelings until his stomach starts to rumble as the light begins to die. But, when he sees Mack’s name flash up on the caller ID, his thumb freezes on the screen. This, he knows, is one call he cannot avoid.

Sucking in a deep breath, Fitz sits up. He closes his eyes, steeling himself, before answering the phone.

‘Hey, Mack.’

His friend hasn’t spoken to him since the night he’d left Jemma’s. He’d called him after leaving her sleeping on the sofa, told him he was quitting and to send a replacement as soon as possible. Mack had been furious, just as Fitz had known he would be. ‘I trusted you, Fitz,’ he’d said, the disappointment heavy in his voice. Fitz had nodded, even though he knew Mack couldn’t see him. ‘I know,’ he’d said. ‘I know you did.’ He’d known exactly how hurt Mack was feeling, because Fitz had trusted himself too. He seemed to have quite the talent for letting people down these days.

‘Fitz.’ Mack sounds tense. ‘I need you to stay calm.’

Fitz snorts bitterly. ‘Mack, I know that I’m fired. I’d really appreciate it if you’d just come out and say it. I can take it.’

‘You’re not _fired_ , Fitz. There’s something you need to…’ Mack trails off, as though he can’t bring himself to say the words. ‘Something’s happened.’

A coldness spreads over Fitz’s body. He swings his legs around, suddenly needing to feel the floor beneath his feet.

‘Mack,’ he says, ‘what is it?’

‘Before I tell you, I need to know that you’ll stay calm.’

Fitz grits his teeth. ‘Mack. What is it?’

Mack pauses, and the moment seems to stretch out forever.

‘There’s been an accident,’ he says, ‘it’s Jemma.’

In the explanation that follows, only snatches of it filter through to Fitz. A gunshot wound to the stomach. A man dressed in black caught escaping out the fire exit. Blood, and lots of it. The name of the hospital where Mack was waiting now with Daisy and Piper and Elena. He is still talking when Fitz interrupts him abruptly.

‘I’ll be there in an hour.’

His voice sounds strangely disconnected, as if it belonged to someone else entirely. He hears Mack sigh.

‘Fitz…’

There is a pause on the end of the line, and it occurs to Fitz for the first time that his friend understands just how much Jemma means to him. Mack sighs again.

‘Drive safely, okay?’

Though his throat feels thick, Fitz manages to make a reply.

‘I’ll be there in an hour,’ he repeats, and hangs up the phone.

He stands up, then immediately has to sit down again to stop himself from falling. His arms and legs are shaking as the shock of Mack’s news sinks in. Jemma has been hurt. She has been shot in the stomach by an intruder at Flare’s press conference and has been rushed to hospital. Fitz’s head feels too heavy for his neck to hold up and it lolls into his hands. Jemma has been hurt, and he hadn’t been there to stop it.

Sucking in a sharp breath, Fitz lifts his head. A new urgency fills him as he scrambles around the bedroom for his car keys, his wallet, a pair of shoes. He has to get there. He has to be there for her now, even if _now_ is too little too late.

He drives through the busy city streets as if in a dream, trapped in a nightmare where the roads continue to stretch for miles and he can never reach her. Mack’s plea for him to drive safely floats in the back of his head, rising to the surface whenever he is tempted to jump a red light or undertake a bus. It makes him hit the brakes, take a breath. The only thing that matters is getting to Jemma as soon as possible, and getting in a wreck is a delay he cannot afford.

Waiting for a light to turn green, Fitz presses his fingernails into the leather of the steering wheel and listens to the pounding of his heart. _Please_ , it is saying, _please_. Fitz adds his own voice to the prayer, and drives on.

It is only when he reaches the hospital, after he has stridden through the sliding double doors and seen Daisy waiting for him, that he falters. Daisy’s arms are crossed tightly over her chest and she is wearing a black expression. When she steps towards him, Fitz can see that her eyes are red raw.

‘I’m not talking to you,’ she declares.

Fitz’s heart sinks. Suddenly, it occurs to him that his decision to come here had been all his own. He’d never stopped to imagine that he might not be wanted.

All the frantic questions he wants to ask Daisy die on his lips. His arms drop uselessly to his sides and, for the first time since Mack had told him Jemma had been shot, tears spring to his eyes.

Daisy glowers at him, before spinning on her heel and stomping towards the elevator. She presses the button and turns to glance at him over her shoulder.

‘Well? Are you coming?’

Confused by this about turn, Fitz stumbles towards her. The elevator arrives and Daisy ushers him in before pressing the button for the fourth floor. Fitz waits until the doors slide shut before raising his voice.

‘I thought you weren’t talking to me,’ he says.

‘I’m not,’ Daisy retorts, ‘and if it was up to me, I wouldn’t want you here. But Jemma…’ She breaks off, collects herself before continuing. ‘If she could say what she wanted right now, it would be you.’

Guilt washes over Fitz in a hot wave. He has a sudden vision of Jemma’s face, her trust in him shining like the sun. Shame burns his cheeks as he realises how badly he has abused that trust. Clearly, Daisy knows this too. Otherwise she wouldn’t be looking at him with such distaste. Fitz is filled with a desire to explain himself.

‘I didn’t want to quit,’ he says, watching Daisy roll her eyes, ‘I didn’t want to leave her. But it felt like the right thing to do. And besides,’ he adds, with a wrench of self-pity, ‘it’s not as if she fought very hard to get me to stay.’

Daisy scoffs at him, shaking her head.

‘You idiot,’ she says, although there is no malice in her voice.

The elevator doors open again and she steps out, turning back to look at him.

‘She didn’t fight for you to stay,’ Daisy says, ‘because she’d rather bleed out herself than watch it happen to you.’

She walks away, hurrying down the corridor that leads to Jemma, but Fitz is left rooted to the spot. Daisy’s words repeat themselves in his head, over and over again, until the realisation dawns on him that they are the truth.

Something pulls at him, deep down in his gut, and he lurches forward just in time to stop the elevator doors slinking shut once more. Stepping out, Fitz curls his hands into fists and follows after Daisy.

The hospital staff have put the Flare team in a private room as they wait for Jemma to come out of surgery. Daisy leads Fitz inside, then goes immediately to Mack’s side. He shakes his head at her, a slight gesture that Fitz understands right away. There has been no news since Daisy has been gone.

With a heavy sigh, Daisy sinks into a chair. Recognising that there is nothing else to do but wait, Fitz does the same, glancing about the room as he does so. Bobbi is here, pacing up and down the room in her sky-high heels and tapping her phone against her leg. She looks no less pleased to see him than Daisy had. Piper and Elena are here too, both of their faces pinched with worry. Piper in particular looks very shaken and won’t meet his eye.

Time passes painfully slowly. The clock on the wall ticks and Fitz counts every passing second until his concentration slips and he has to start again. Every so often, a nurse will walk past their door and everyone inside will look up, eager for news. When the nurse passes them by, their heads fall back down again and the waiting resumes.

Officer Nelson arrives, and Bobbi and Daisy get up to talk to him. Fitz hears their raised voices move down the corridor until they are too muffled for him to make out their words. Then, a little while later, he watches Mack and Elena share a look before leaving the room together. Piper clears her throat, visibly uncomfortable.

‘I’m gonna…’ She makes a non-committal gesture. ‘Coffee.’

Fitz fails to muster enough interest to respond.

He is still alone in the waiting room when a nurse finally comes and knocks on the door. She seems surprise to find it so empty.

‘There were so many people here earlier.’

‘They’re coming back,’ Fitz says quickly. He feels the need to reassure her of this, to show her how much Jemma is loved. ‘They just had to step out.’

‘What unfortunate timing,’ the nurse says. ‘Miss Simmons is out of surgery.’

Fitz’s knees go weak with relief.

‘She’s going to be okay?’

The nurse gives him a nod. ‘She’s being moved to recovery as we speak.’

Fitz lifts a shaking hand to his face, covering his eyes as he gulps in several deep breaths. All this time, there had been a dark thought in the back of his mind, although he’d refused to let it surface. The horrifying possibility of Jemma not making it through the night had loomed large before him ever since Mack’s phone call, growing even larger once he made it to the hospital. The thought of a world without her in it had terrified him, so much so that he didn’t care anymore who knew it. But now –

The nurse lays an understanding hand on his shoulder.

‘Would you like to come and wait for her?’

She shows him to a recovery room where Jemma is lying on a bed, hooked up to several beeping machines and propped up on an abundance of pillows. As the door closes softly behind him, Fitz can only stare at her. He’d thought he’d known how much he missed her, had felt it acutely enough to know how intense his longing had been. Now though, he knows that however much he’d thought he’d missed her had only been the tip of the iceberg.

In spite of this, Fitz finds himself feeling strangely shy as he walks slowly towards Jemma’s bed. He can see her chest slowly rising and falling, her breathing kept constant by the oxygen mask pulled over her nose and mouth. Her face is pale, as is the delicate skin of her forearm that has been twisted upwards so an IV can be inserted into the crook of her elbow. It feels impossible to Fitz that after coming so close to losing her, to never being able to see her again, he is allowed to take his place by her side once more.

A chair has been pulled to her bedside and he sits on it gingerly.

‘Hi, Jemma,’ he whispers.

The nurse had told him it could be a while before she woke up, so Fitz isn’t expecting a reply. In fact, he is relieved he has a little longer to be alone with his thoughts. All the apologies and explanations he had been running through his head for the past few hours had vanished the moment he walked into the room. He needs more time to get it right, so that when Jemma does wake up he stands the best chance of being forgiven.

‘Even if I don’t really deserve it,’ he mumbles to himself, glancing over at her. She makes no reproach, which encourages him to keep going. ‘I wasn’t fair to you, Jemma. If only I’d been honest about my feelings, none of this would have happened.’

He reaches out, wanting to take her hand, then stops himself.

‘I was just so afraid of making a mistake. At first that was because I didn’t want to let Mack down. But then I met you and I got to know you and it started to dawn on me that I would rather die than let anything happen to you. And that scared me so much that I ended up making the biggest mistake of all.’

Fitz lets out a shaky breath. It feels good to admit all that.

‘I’m sorry that I left, Jemma,’ he says quietly, ‘and I’m sorry that I broke my promise and wasn’t there when you needed me. I don’t know how I’m ever going to make it up to you, but, if you’ll let me, I’d like to try.’

This time, he feels brave enough to rest his palm on the back of her hand. Her skin is soft and warm and evokes a memory of a touch that had made him feel whole. A lump rises in the back of Fitz’s throat.

‘From the moment you met me, you’ve trusted me to protect your body. Do you think you’ll ever be able to trust me with your heart?’

His voice quavers on the last word, and as it dies away Jemma’s hand twitches beneath his own. Fitz’s heart leaps as her eyes scrunch together before fluttering open. Her gaze lands on him and, despite the oxygen mask pulled over her face, he sees her smile.

Tears blur Fitz’s vision as Jemma slowly moves her fingers until they are interconnected with his own.

‘Fitz,’ she croaks, and although her voice is faint and tired and rough, she sounds happy.

Her name sounds so good on his lips, a sound he’d thought he might never head again, that it takes a moment for Fitz to collect himself enough to speak.

‘Yeah,’ he manages eventually. He squeezes her hand, gently. ‘It’s me.’

‘I missed you,’ Jemma says. There is a faraway look in her eyes, a clear daze that Fitz can only imagine has been brought on by heavy medication. ‘Please…don’t go again.’

Emotion rises in the back of Fitz’s throat once more. How could he ever have gone in the first place? Sitting with her like this now, it feels unthinkable. It feels like the memory of a bad dream, something to learn from but never live through again.

Jemma gazes up at him, as though she is drinking in the sight of him. Fitz understands the feeling – watching her sleep had felt like coming up for air after two weeks spent drowning. He can’t tell whether or not she had heard his declaration, but he realises that it doesn’t matter. The way that she is looking at him is all the answer he will ever need.

‘No,’ he tells her, a promise that he fully intends to keep. ‘I won’t.’


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "‘What did she say?’ she asks, as soon as they are out the door and out of earshot.
> 
> ‘Uh.’ Fitz rubs the back of his neck. ‘She said that she thought we were a beautiful couple.’
> 
> There is a look of dazed pride on his face, and Jemma can’t stop herself from staring at it as they step out of the café and onto the street. 
> 
> A beautiful couple. The words repeat themselves in her mind, making her heart beat faster with excitement. She and Fitz haven’t talked about what they are to each other yet, what label, if any, they are ready to put on their relationship. Jemma knows what she wants, would tell him if he asked, but she is nervous to do so unprompted. She didn’t want to assume anything, just because they have kissed twice and he had rushed to her bedside when she was dying. What meant something to her didn’t necessarily mean the same to Fitz. But the happiness showing on his face at someone thinking they are a couple, and a beautiful one at that, gives Jemma hope that maybe it does."
> 
> Recovery, and a little romance.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> apparently when i was titling my chapters i skipped chapter twelve so in fact there's only fourteen chapters to this fic. i'm just as disoriented as you are.

Fitz is pretending to hum and ha over a bouquet of yellow roses as he stands by the flower stall outside the hospital. He tips their petals back and finger their green leaves, trying his hardest to look as though he is seriously considering buying them. The assistant manning the stall knows perfectly well that he isn’t, having served him for five days in a row now, but she turns a polite blind eye anyway.

Behind the stall, a white van is offloading the day’s fresh flowers. Fitz watches as stacks of sunflowers and lilies and tulips are unloaded and arranged on the stall front, biding his time as convincingly as he can until the stall assistant places a posy of peach-coloured peonies in front of him with a knowing look. Fitz gives her a sheepish grin.

‘These ones, please.’

With the bouquet of peonies tucked under his arm, Fitz presses the elevator button for Jemma’s floor. She’d been moved to a private wing of the hospital as soon as she was well enough to leave recovery. Her surgery had gone well, but it had left her weak and tired. Fitz is watching more and more of her strength return every day, and, as he leans in to sniff the peonies, he hopes that today he will see a matching pink in her cheeks. He smiles at their frilly petals. Peonies were Jemma’s favourite flower, but the sight of them always reminds Fitz of the paperweight she’d once used to defend them against Flare’s intruder. It is a fond memory.

When he reaches the waiting area next to Jemma’s room, Piper is already there. She lifts her head from her phone and they share a friendly nod in greeting.

Technically speaking, Piper is still Jemma’s bodyguard. She is the one still employed by Flare, and she is the one who will receive the pay-check at the end of the month. But over the last week, she and Fitz have reached a silent understanding. Jemma’s door is never left unguarded. If one of them is not there, then the other one is, checking that anyone who enters her room is authorised to do so.

Fitz does not mind sharing this responsibility with Piper. Jemma likes her and she is good at her job, her dedication doubled through her guilt at letting the shooting happen in the first place. She’d even tried to quit over it, but Jemma wouldn’t hear of it.

‘It was my own fault that it happened,’ she’d told Fitz quietly. ‘I don’t want Piper to feel like she was responsible.’

Fitz had nodded, although he’d frowned at the thought that Jemma blamed herself for getting shot. The only person to blame, in his mind, was the one who’d been holding the gun.

He’d since learnt that Jemma’s shooter was the same man who’d killed Lucas James; Jemma had been able to positively identify him once she’d woken up. He was also, Fitz suspected, the same person who’d attacked him and Jemma that night at Flare. In a shocking twist that the press were going wild over, the man claimed that he took his orders from Mr. Kitson of Kitson Computers. It gave Fitz a grim satisfaction to know that both men were currently sitting in jail cells, awaiting trial. He also knew that if Bobbi had her way they would rot there for the rest of their miserable lives.

Almost as if she’d read his thoughts, Piper clears her throat.

‘Bobbi and Daisy are inside,’ she says, nodding towards Jemma’s door. ‘And Officer Nelson is with them. I checked his badge before I let him go in.’

Fitz sits down beside her. ‘You know, I think we can trust Officer Nelson not to secretly be an assassin.’

Piper contemplates this. ‘Maybe. But I’d rather be safe than sorry.’

Fitz is about to respond when the electronic pings from Piper’s phone distract him. He leans over to see what is making so much noise.

‘Hey, is that Eco-Quest?’

‘Yeah.’ Piper pulls a face. ‘I know, it’s terrible, but I’m so addicted. I walked three flights of stairs of the hospital during my break yesterday, trying to unlock a new energy saving mode. I’d be so mad with Rick for introducing me to it if I wasn’t having so much fun…’

As she talks, Fitz stares at the coloured pixels dancing across her screen and feels a shiver run down his spine. It has always felt wrong to him that technology designed by Kitson Computers, Flare’s biggest rival, should have made its way into the company’s most intimate circles. Given recent events, though, something about it now feels downright sinister. He opens his mouth, about to share this thought with Piper, when Jemma’s door swings open and he leaps to his feet instead.

Bobbi exits first, sees him, and raises one hand in his direction before turning to continue talking at Officer Nelson, who has stepped out after her. Fitz isn’t entirely sure how the police officer always manages to be in Flare’s lawyer’s bad books, but it amuses him to see every time.

Daisy follows them both out and catches his eye. With a smirk, she jerks her head towards the open door.

‘She’s waiting for you.’

Tucking his thought about Kitson into the back of his mind, ready to bring back out another time, Fitz picks up his peonies and steps forward.

Jemma’s eyes light up when he presents them to her and she beams as she takes them into her arms.

‘Oh, Fitz! Thank you.’ She breathes in, inhaling their sweet, intoxicating scent. ‘They’re _beautiful_.’

‘You’re welcome.’

Bending down, Fitz presses a light kiss to her forehead. This is something he’s only been brave enough to do for the last three days, feeling too shy of her before then. Yesterday, though, Jemma had tilted her face towards his in anticipation of the kiss and it had made Fitz’s heart flip over inside his chest. He is so in love with her, he thinks, that one day he will burst.

‘So,’ he says with a twinkle in his eye, ‘who received yesterday’s bunch?’

Jemma looks up at him guiltily. The morning after he’d brought her the first bunch of peonies, he’d arrived in her room to find them gone. Jemma had confessed to donating them to an old woman down the hall, who had no family and no friends to send her flowers of her own. Once she’d fallen asleep, Fitz had snuck out of her room to buy her a new bouquet. The two of them now held an understanding that every day Jemma would find someone new to gift her peonies to, and every day Fitz would buy her fresh ones.

‘A little girl,’ Jemma says, ‘she had an emergency appendectomy early this morning. She’s still asleep, but her father promised me he’d put them just where she’ll see them when she wakes up.’

She smiles, and Fitz knows that if even the thought of bringing other people joy made her this happy he would happily buy her a whole field of peonies.

‘How about you?’ he asks her. ‘How are you feeling today?’

Jemma nods, still admiring the flowers cradled in her arms. ‘I feel good. Better than I did yesterday, and better again than I had the day before.’ She looks up at him wryly. ‘I believe it’s called healing.’

Fitz laughs. ‘And I’m very glad you’re experiencing it.’

He takes the peonies back when she hands them to him, finding a vase on her bedside table to arrange them in. He can feel Jemma watching him, her head tipped backwards on her pillows.

‘Apparently,’ she says lightly, ‘I’m very good at it.’ She pauses, waiting for him to turn back to face her. When he does, Fitz can see anxious anticipation on her face. ‘The doctors want to discharge me tomorrow.’

A myriad of thoughts pass through Fitz’s mind, but the only one he can think to vocalise is: ‘oh?’

‘Yes.’ Jemma purses her lips together. ‘And I’m ready to leave the hospital, truly I am. But Officer Nelson doesn’t want me to go home just yet.’

Fitz nods, this having been one of many concerns of his own. It was too soon after the attack for her to go back to her apartment. They couldn’t guarantee that she’d be safe there, not when it was clear that someone would stop at nothing to keep her quiet.

‘No,’ he agrees. ‘Where does he want you to go instead?’

Jemma shrugs. ‘Somewhere small and quiet. Somewhere I’m unlikely to be recognised and can get plenty of rest. I…I was thinking about going to the seaside.’

Knowing how much she enjoyed being by the ocean, Fitz grins. ‘Sounds like a plan.’

‘Mm.’ Jemma smiles back, hesitantly. ‘But, Fitz, I was wondering…would you like to come with me? You don’t have to, of course,’ she adds, glancing quickly up at him, ‘not if you’re busy, or if you don’t want to, but, well, I have to take someone and the truth is there’s no one I’d rather have with me than you.’

The honesty of this statement momentarily takes Fitz aback, and he blinks. They haven’t talked much about their feelings for one another yet, both of them finding it easier to tiptoe around them while Jemma was still healing. They were still there, both of them highly aware of it now, but what they felt for each other no longer felt like weights on their hearts. Jemma’s admission feels like the beginning of the end and the start of something new.

Fitz realises that she is waiting for him to give her an answer. It amazes him that, after all this time, she could have any doubt as to what it will be.

Reaching across the bed, he links his hand with hers.

‘When do we leave?’

Jemma is bored.

She hates to admit it, knowing full well how bad it sounds. With everything that’s happened to her over the last two weeks, she ought to be feeling like the luckiest girl in the world.

For starters, she is alive. She is reminded of this every time she takes a breath and feels the air fill her lungs. She was shot in the stomach and survived. She looked her worst-case-scenario dead in the eye and lived to tell the tale. She still isn’t quite sure why she was allowed to live when Lucas James and so many others weren’t, but even when the guilt pinches at her, she is thankful for it. She is alive, and one day soon the surgery scar on her middle will be nothing but a fine line from her belly button to her ribcage.

Secondly, and it makes Jemma’s heart jump every time she remembers, Fitz has come back to her. He’d been by her side from the moment she’d woken up and has hardly left it since. It feels like half of her heart has come home.

So, Jemma really shouldn’t be feeling bored. She has her life, the person she cares about most in the world, and, since their move to a rented beach house three days before, the ocean outside her window. And yet she can’t help herself.

When she’d first proposed that she and Fitz holiday in this sleepy seaside town, she’d imagined their days playing out very differently. She’d daydreamed about rockpool trails, beach walks hand in hand, and candle-lit dinners at bistros on the quayside. It had seemed like the perfect place to dip their toes into romance.

In reality, though, she and Fitz have barely left the beach house. In the mornings, he carries her from her bed to the sofa, which is where she stays until night falls and it is time for him to carry her back. By their second evening, Jemma has more than enough strength in her legs to walk but she enjoys being lifted by him so much that she resists the urge to tell him so. Instead, she simply presses her face into his neck and breathes in the warmth of his skin.

By their forth morning at the beach house, however, even this pleasure is beginning to wear thin. Putting the book she has been pretending to flick through down, Jemma lifts her head.

‘Fitz?’

Since he is never more than an arms-reach away, something that would infuriate her if he was anyone other than himself, Fitz is immediately by her side.

‘Yeah? Are you okay?’

It is endearing, the concern he has for her, if a little overbearing. Jemma smiles reassuringly.

‘I’m fine, Fitz. Really. I was just thinking, what if we took a walk today? We could go down the pier or into the town. I’ve read that there’s an excellent seashell museum, apparently it’s quite famous.’

She tries to keep her tone casual, as though if she is nonchalant enough he will agree without even thinking about it. Unfortunately, she is not that lucky.

Fitz frowns. ‘I’m not sure. It’s probably safer if we stay inside the house.’

Not to be dissuaded, Jemma leans over the arm of the sofa and bats her eyelashes at him.

‘Oh, with you I’d feel safe anywhere.’

It has the desired effect. Fitz scoffs, his face turning bright red.

‘That’s not…I don’t…’ He tilts his head at her accusingly. ‘You’re just saying that to get what you want.’

‘Partly,’ Jemma admits. She swings her legs around so she is facing him. ‘But it’s also true. I do feel safer when you’re with me, and I want you to know that. I just also want to spend some time outside of these four walls and I’m pretty sure you do too.’

Fitz looks at her, and Jemma knows that she is right. Indecision flits across his face, his desire to protect her coming into conflict with his equally powerful wish to give her what she wants. Jemma waits patiently, knowing privately that she will respect whatever choice he makes.

With a fond sigh, Fitz sets aside the crossword he’d been working through.

‘Let’s compromise,’ he suggests. ‘How does lunch out sound?’

‘Absolutely perfect.’

The café they choose sits next to the seashell museum. It has no candles and no quayside views, but it serves a range of delicious sounding soups that perk Fitz right up, so to Jemma it is just as perfect as any bistro could be.

They take their seats in the café garden, sheltered from the wind but still able to hear the sound of the sea on the breeze. When the café owner comes out to bring them tall glasses of cloudy lemonade, she also presents them a menu so they can choose their order. Once she has gone, Jemma wrinkles her nose at Fitz.

‘What on earth is a Cullen sink?’

‘Only the best soup in the world,’ Fitz replies, taking a sip of his lemonade. ‘You’ll see.’

And she does. When the café owner returns with two steaming bowls and a basket of warm bread for them to share, Fitz lets her dip her bread into his soup. Jemma puts the morsel into her mouth and closes her eyes as the haddock melts on her tongue, leaving her with a tang of parsley and a hankering for more.

‘Mmmm,’ she says, thinking now that her own bowl of Stilton and broccoli soup paled in comparison.

Fitz gives her a satisfied smirk as he picks up his spoon. ‘Told you.’

They are the only customers sitting in the garden, which Jemma finds she rather likes. Other than the café owner popping her head out the door every so often, she and Fitz are undisturbed as they talk and laugh, sharing spoonfuls of soup and feeding one another morsels of bread. It feels like, just for today, this space exists only for them.

When they leave, Fitz pays at the inside counter. Jemma is shrugging on her jacket when she notices the café owner lean towards him with a smile as he passes her the money. Jemma doesn’t hear what she says, only notices that, whatever it is, it makes Fitz blush furiously.

‘What did she say?’ she asks, as soon as they are out the door and out of earshot.

‘Uh.’ Fitz rubs the back of his neck. ‘She said that she thought we were a beautiful couple.’

There is a look of dazed pride on his face, and Jemma can’t stop herself from staring at it as they step out of the café and onto the street.

_A beautiful couple_. The words repeat themselves in her mind, making her heart beat faster with excitement. She and Fitz haven’t talked about what they are to each other yet, what label, if any, they are ready to put on their relationship. Jemma knows what she wants, would tell him if he asked, but she is nervous to do so unprompted. She didn’t want to assume anything, just because they have kissed twice and he had rushed to her bedside when she was dying. What meant something to her didn’t necessarily mean the same to Fitz. But the happiness showing on his face at someone thinking they are a couple, and a beautiful one at that, gives Jemma hope that maybe it does.

She is so distracted by her thoughts that it takes her a while to notice that they are not heading back to the beach house. Instead, Fitz is walking her through the town’s quaint cobbled streets towards the sea front. As the ocean comes into view at the bottom of the hill, the breeze starts to pick up, tugging at her hair and pulling it out of its ponytail. Pushing it out of her eyes, Jemma glances up at Fitz.

‘Is there anywhere we’re heading for in particular?’

‘No,’ Fitz says with a shrug. ‘The sea, I suppose. Since we’re out of the house and the weather’s still bright, I thought we could take a walk.’ He looks at her, suddenly concerned. ‘Unless you’re tired? Do you want to go back?’

Jemma laughs, slipping her hand into the crook of his arm. ‘No,’ she says, shaking her head. ‘I’m not tired at all. And I’d love to see the sea. I just assumed that after we’d had lunch you’d be marching me back to bed.’

Fitz gives her a sheepish smile. ‘Is that your way of telling me I’ve been a bit much this week?’

‘Maybe,’ Jemma admits, giving his arm a gentle squeeze. ‘But I don’t mind.’

They have reached the sea front by now, with its ice cream parlours and beach shacks lining the promenade. Most of them are closed for the season now, the early autumn chill driving holidaymakers further inland, but a few are still open, their brightly coloured bunting fluttering in the wind. Low clouds roll on the horizon, painted in vibrant shades of blue.

‘I’m sorry,’ Fitz says suddenly. ‘I suppose I have been a bit overprotective this week. I haven’t wanted to suffocate you. It’s just that I’ve been so scared, ever since I got that call from Mack and realised that I could have lost you.’ He gives her an apologetic grimace. ‘I guess that feeling isn’t going away any time soon.’

Jemma feels a sharp pang in her chest when he says this. She remembers her nightmare of him being hurt, how real the fear had felt long after she’d woken from it. It occurs to her now that while that had been just a dream for her, something to be afraid of happening, for Fitz it had turned into something very real. He had seen her hurt and he had thought she might not make it. It pains her to realise that she was the cause of that fear.

‘You don’t have to be sorry,’ she says softly. ‘I…I would have felt the same way. In fact, that’s why I let you quit in the first place. I was so afraid that you’d get hurt in place of me, and I couldn’t have lived with myself if I’d let that happen.’

‘Funnily enough, I felt I _had_ to quit for the same reason.’ Fitz looks at her ruefully. ‘I didn’t want my feelings for you to distract me from my job. If you’d gotten hurt all because I lost my focus again…I don’t know what I’d have done.’ He takes a shaky breath before adding: ‘if you hadn’t got better, I don’t know what I’d have done.’

Feeling him start to slip away from her, back to the uncertainty of the hospital waiting room and an unstable future beneath his feet, Jemma steps away from his side and turns inwards, so that they are pressed heart to heart.

‘Let’s not thinking about that now,’ she suggests gently, tucking her hands into his. ‘I’m alright.’ She nods towards him. ‘You’re alright. And we’re together again. That’s what really matters, isn’t it?’

Fitz nods, with a slow exhale. ‘Yeah,’ he agrees, squeezing her fingers tight. ‘You’re right. It is.’

His forehead has dropped low and is resting on hers. If Jemma tilted her face upwards even the slightest, she would be able to see the blue of his eyes, bright enough to rival the waves crashing on the beach around them. Despite the warmth of his breath on her cheeks, she shivers.

It is only a small shiver, but Fitz notices it all the same. He frowns.

‘Are you cold?’

He pulls away from her, but only far enough for him to shrug off his jacket. He drapes it around her shoulders, tucking her hair beneath the collar. Jemma’s reply, that she isn’t cold at all, dies on her lips at the tenderness of his gesture. Her heart warms as she realises that, no matter what she says, Fitz is always going to want to take care of her, just the same as she is always going to want to look out for him. That was what it meant to love.

‘Is that better?’ Fitz asks.

Jemma nods. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Much.’

Reaching out, she takes his hands again, stepping forward so that their bodies are entwined once more.

‘We’ve both made mistakes,’ she says quietly, the liminality of the ocean feeling like the perfect place to admit this, ‘but our hearts were always in the right place.’

‘Yeah,’ Fitz whispers. ‘With each other.’ He smiles at her. ‘We just got our wires crossed along the way.’

Jemma looks at him, and in an instant she is transported back to the first day they’d met. Fitz had stood in front of her in her office and she’d been struck with a sudden understanding, deep inside, that her life had changed forever. She hadn’t known until this moment just how right she had turned out to be.

‘In which case,’ she says, before she changes her mind, ‘I propose that from now on we do our best to always be honest with each other.’

Fitz considers this. ‘That sounds like a good plan.’

‘And,’ Jemma adds, feeling her heart start to hammer against her ribcage, ‘I think I’d like to start right now.’

When she looks up and sees the surprise in his face, the hope shining in his eyes, she finds the courage to tell him the truth she feels in her heart.

‘I’m in love with you, Fitz. I have been for a very long time, ever since you kissed me in the restaurant and maybe even before that. I love you in a way that I’ve never loved anyone before, and I doubt I ever will again. And I know that your job makes things complicated and I understand that. But I also know that I need you in my life, in whatever way you’re happy for that to be, so…’

She doesn’t need to finish. Fitz’s hand pulls out of her own and comes up to cup her cheek, allowing him to pull her close enough to kiss. His lips meet hers and it feels like the sealing of something unbreakable.

When they pull apart, Jemma can taste salt spray on his skin. She cocks an eyebrow, his kiss having filled her with confidence.

‘I take it that’s my answer?’

Fitz laughs, and it is the most wonderful sound she has ever heard.

‘I’m so in love with you, Jemma,’ he says, sending her soul soaring, ‘and that feeling isn’t going away any time soon either.’

Happiness bubbles up inside Jemma’s chest as she loops her arms around his neck.

‘Good,’ she murmurs, before lifting herself up onto her tiptoes to kiss him again.

If Jemma had been asked that first day they’d met whether getting a bodyguard was changing her life for the better or for the worse, then she would have decidedly replied _worse_. But now, with Fitz’s arms around her and his love feeling like invisible armour, she realises just how wrong she had been. She would not change a single moment of the time they have had together, not for the world. Because every day they have spent side by side has brought them here, to this moment, when they are standing together on the edge of the world, drifting away on the cusp of something wonderfully new.


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "She is enjoying herself so much that Bobbi’s email, when it comes, feels like a bucket of cold seawater thrown over her head. Jemma stares at her phone for a minute or two, her eyes skimming her lawyer's plans for the hearing but her mind retaining none of the information. Eventually she comes to a grim decision and tucks the phone back into her bag with a sigh. She had always known this little pocket of joy she is sharing with Fitz can’t last forever. The rest of the world is waiting for them. Part of her had hoped though that the world would keep on waiting, even if just a little while longer."
> 
> Strategies and sanctuaries.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm so sorry for forgetting to update this fic! i got very distracted posting my other project and it completely slipped my mind. hopefully it's worth the wait, and check out my new persuasion au if that's your cup of tea.
> 
> this is (sadly) the last full length chapter. i've got a shorter epilogue that i'll post on sunday to finish this fic off!

In the end, it is Fitz who catches a chill from their walk on the seafront. He spends the next two days huddled under a blanket, shivering, and Jemma is secretly thrilled at the opportunity to look after him for once. She makes him hot honey and lemon, and when he falls asleep with his head in her lap, she threads her fingers through his hair and luxuriates in how happy she is.

Once Fitz is feeling better, their holiday begins in earnest. They take daily strolls on the beach, picking up smooth stones and nuggets of brightly coloured sea glass. They test every ice cream vendor on the promenade and unanimously agree that the salted-caramel gelato is the best of all.

Although they try out different places for lunch, they often find themselves drawn back to the soup café. The owner, Gina, lights up every time they walk through the door, and always shows them to the same table in the café garden. ‘Only the best for such a beautiful couple,’ she says, and it never fails to make Fitz blush. Jemma smiles into her soup, falling a little bit more in love with him every time.

They even make it to the seashell museum. The small hall next to the café has rows of cabinets mounted on pale blue walls, each one filled with different specimens of shells and fossils, ammonites and geodes. They tread the worn wooden floorboards, carefully reading every handwritten information card. On their way out, Jemma buys a large, pearly conch and a few books on shells and beachcombing to add to her shelves at home. She has a feeling she’s going to want to remember this moment of her life for years to come.

She is enjoying herself so much that Bobbi’s email, when it comes, feels like a bucket of cold seawater thrown over her head. Jemma stares at her phone for a minute or two, her eyes skimming her lawyer's plans for the hearing but her mind retaining none of the information. Eventually she comes to a grim decision and tucks the phone back into her bag with a sigh. She had always known this little pocket of joy she is sharing with Fitz can’t last forever. The rest of the world is waiting for them. Part of her had hoped though that the world would keep on waiting, even if just a little while longer.

‘Penny for your thoughts,’ Fitz mumbles.

It is the morning of their last day of holiday. Despite the lateness of the hour, they are still lying in bed, the blankets twisted about their legs. Jemma has her head resting on Fitz’s chest, and he is drawing patterns on her stomach with his finger. His touch is gentle, especially when he reaches the edges of the dressings she still changes every day.

Jemma tilts her head up at him.

‘Is that all they’re worth to you?’ she teases.

Fitz groans. She can feel his whole body vibrate with it and it delights her. ‘Jemma, please. You know that every thought you have is priceless to me.’

With a grin, Jemma leans upwards to kiss him. She does it slowly, so as not to strain her stitches, but also because she has found it is more enjoyable that way. It gives her the time to marvel at the way it is becoming familiar to her, a privilege she knows she will never get tired of having.

Fitz kisses her back eagerly, his lips warm and welcoming.

‘If you’re worried about tomorrow,’ he says once they have pulled apart, ‘that’s okay. Going back is a big step, especially when the hearing is next week.’ He squeezes her hand reassuringly. ‘We can talk about that, if you want to.’

A fresh wave of love for him rolls over Jemma. For a moment, she wishes that she could take his face in her hands and kiss him again, tugging them both back down into their mutual desire. If only she could get them lost for a while. But, at the back of her mind, she knows that this is an avoidance tactic. She has to talk to Fitz at some point before they go back, and now seems as good a time as any.

‘Actually,’ she says, ‘I do want to talk about that.’

Fitz seems almost surprised. ‘Oh. Okay.’

Pushing herself into an upright position, Jemma thinks for a moment, trying to decide the best way to go about this.

‘Do you remember when you told me that you loved me?’

She watches as a dreamy smile spreads across Fitz’s face, prompted by the memory. ‘Seeing as it was probably the best moment of my life, yes. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forget.’

‘Excellent. Hold onto that.’ With a deep breath, Jemma meets and holds his gaze. ‘I want to drop the charges for the shooting.’

As she’d expected, Fitz’s eyes go wide as saucers. ‘Are you _mad_?’

‘No. Yes.’ Jemma shakes her head. ‘Possibly. Just…let me explain. Please?’

Fitz draws his hand over his face and heaves a heavy sigh. But he doesn’t offer her any immediate protest, so Jemma takes that as an invitation. She licks her lips, having found that they feel horribly dry.

‘If the hearing goes ahead,’ she says steadily, ‘then both Kitson and his henchman will be found guilty. You and I both know that.’

‘Um, yes.’ Fitz tilts his head at her, thoroughly confused. ‘I thought that was what we wanted.’

‘It is.’ Jemma bites her lip. ‘But I’ve just had an email from Bobbi. The hearing is happening before the trial for Lucas’s murder. If they go to jail for shooting me then it makes whatever verdict reached weeks later seem…seem pointless.’

Fitz sighs, as though he finally understands. ‘Jemma…’

‘I don’t want what happened to him to be forgotten,’ Jemma says, hearing her voice start to break. ‘I want everyone to know that they’re guilty for that too.’

‘And they will. We’ll make sure of that.’ Fitz slips his hand into hers and rubs his thumb, comfortingly, on the back of her palm. ‘But, Jemma, Lucas isn’t the only one who deserves justice. You need it too.’

With a soft laugh, Jemma leans against his shoulder. ‘I already _have_ justice. I have my life.’ She nudges him gently. ‘And I have you. Both are things that I could have lost because of them. But I didn’t. Lucas and his family weren’t so lucky, and I owe it to them to make sure that when Kitson goes down it’s because of what happened to Lucas. Not because of what happened to me.’

She waits, chewing her bottom lip, as Fitz absorbs this information. Slowly, the frown lines on his forehead start to ease and she knows that, even if he doesn’t like it, he understands. When he looks up at her with a small smile, the knots in Jemma’s stomach relax. He is with her on this, no matter what, and that will make everything easier.

‘You know,’ he says, ‘I wasn’t the hard one convince. How on earth are you planning to get _Daisy_ on board with this?’

Jemma grimaces, knowing that he is right. ‘I almost died for our company. I think I’ve earned the right to get my own way with her for a while, don’t you?’

Fitz snorts with laughter. Jemma feels his arm snake around her waist, drawing her close. ‘That will work on Daisy for all of five minutes.’

‘Incidentally, I think that’s all I need.’

They both smile at each other before falling silent, the enormity of what is before them suddenly looming large. Fitz tucks a loose strand of hair back behind Jemma’s ear before abruptly bending forward to kiss her again. Jemma leans into it gratefully; as unexpected as it is, she realises that they both need this. The meeting of their lips feels like the sealing of a promise, that as long as they are together everything will be alright.

‘What if,’ Fitz murmurs against her mouth, ‘instead of dropping the charges, we got the hearing moved? That way, they’d still get what they deserved for what they did for you.’ He draws back, so that he is looking into her eyes, and Jemma can see the intensity of his love for her written all over his face. ‘But justice for Lucas comes first.’

Jemma lets out a breath. ‘Do you…do you think that’s possible?’

‘With a lawyer like Bobbi, I think anything’s possible,’ Fitz says confidently. ‘What do you say?’

Jemma is nodding even before he has finished the question. ‘Yes. Yes, it’s an ideal solution.’ Somehow, he has lifted a weight off her shoulders she hadn’t even known was there. ‘I don’t know why I didn’t think of it myself.’

‘Because,’ Fitz says softly, ‘you weren’t thinking _of_ yourself.’ He kisses her, lightly, on the forehead. ‘And that’s what I love about you.’

Jemma smiles, and is about to turn and capture his lips with her own once more when he slides out of her grasp. She frowns, indignant, as he climbs off the bed to rummage through his rucksack. He emerges holding a plastic folder, one that Jemma can see that it is bulging with papers.

‘Fitz?’

‘For this to work,’ he says, settling back on the bed beside her, ‘we need a watertight case for Lucas’s murder. It’s not as certain a verdict as your shooting would be. The only evidence we have so far…’

‘…is my testimony,’ Jemma finishes with a nod, ‘you’re right. There needs to be more.’ Looking up at him, she quirks one eyebrow. ‘Got anything in mind?’

There is a gleam in Fitz’s eye as he unfastens the folder and begins to unpack a series of documents onto the bedsheets.

‘Plenty,’ he says. ‘We’ve got a lot of work to do.’

With a grim determination, Jemma takes the first paper he is holding out to her and begins to read. Their holiday may be well and truly over, but something far more important is about to begin.

Daisy has her head in her hands, her hair falling forward to cover her face.

‘Explain it to me again,’ she says through her fingers, ‘maybe if I hear it when I’m not looking at you it won’t sound so stupid.’

Fitz tries not to feel offended by this. He glances over at Jemma, who nods at him encouragingly. Beside her, Bobbi sits with her teacup cradled on her lap looking at the ceiling, as if she is begging God to give her the self-restraint to not scream out loud. Fitz knows exactly how she feels. They have been sitting in Jemma’s living room for almost an hour without making any progress.

‘If we postpone Jemma’s hearing until after the trial for Lucas’s murder, I’ve got evidence that could help us win the case.’

‘Evidence,’ Daisy echoes. She lifts her head to glare at him.

‘Um, yes.’ Fitz shifts his feet on the floor uncomfortably. ‘Being a bodyguard, you pick up on stuff the police don’t see. Over the last few months, I’ve been making notes of things that didn’t quite add up.’

‘See, what I’m hearing,’ Daisy says, ‘is that while I’ve been paying you to protect my best friend and business partner, you’ve been playing detective.’

‘Daisy,’ Jemma speaks up sharply in his defence, ‘that’s not fair.’

Determined to be undeterred, Fitz continues to meet Daisy’s gaze. ‘No. I noticed things, I remembered them, but I never let that distract me from what my true responsibility was. Protecting Jemma has always been my first priority.’

Daisy’s mouth twists, but she leans back in her seat anyway. Part of the tightness Fitz can feel clenched in his chest loosens – she believes him. He is glad about this, because he has always liked Daisy and she has only just forgiven him for quitting in the first place. It would have hurt to lose her good opinion again so soon.

Next to Jemma, Bobbi clears her throat.

‘That’s all very well,’ she says, setting her teacup down, ‘but I have to ask: why you didn’t come to us with this sooner? It might not have been your responsibility to try and solve Lucas’s murder, but it was certainly mine. You could have talked to me about all this long ago.’

Fitz winces.

‘I could have,’ he admits, ‘you’re right. But until recently, I was so sure that my job meant one thing and one thing only, that it wasn’t my place to try and investigate what felt wrong. I didn’t want to overstep the boundaries and find myself making a mistake.’

He gazes at Jemma.

‘But now those lines _have_ blurred, I’ve realised it’s the best thing to ever happen to me. And I wish I’d let it happen sooner.’

When her smile widens, it fills Fitz with a warm glow that makes him feel like he could take on the world and win. He supposes that, together, that is what they are trying to do.

Daisy mumbles something under her breath that he can’t make out, and Bobbi holds out a hand to hush her.

‘Alright, Fitz, we’re listening.’ She leans forward, resting her elbows on her knees. ‘What have you got?’

Mimicking her stance, Fitz reaches for his folder of evidence and opens it up. He starts with a puzzle he knows has been plaguing the police since the night of the murder – how Kitson’s henchman had entered the building in the first place. He spreads a blueprint of Flare’s offices out on Jemma’s coffee table and points to the roof.

Bobbi doesn’t bat an eyelid. ‘You’re kidding.’

Fitz shakes his head. ‘No.’

‘There was no forced entry on any of the windows, on any floor. There was no way for them to get in.’

‘Actually,’ Jemma says, ‘there was. And they didn’t need to force entry. I always left the window in the ladies toilets open so I could climb onto the roof. Fitz found me there once, in our early days.’

‘Which was when I first guessed how he managed to get in.’

Bobbi rubs at her temples. ‘But we never saw him on CCTV. Surely if he climbed all the way up to the roof we’d have seen him.’

‘Kitson has a private helicopter,’ Daisy says suddenly. She has been quite for a while, but now her eyes are bright. ‘He bragged about it once in an interview and got slammed for being careless about his carbon footprint.’

Fitz feels his heart skip a beat. With one glance at Jemma, he sees that this is news to her too. The mechanics of his brain start to tick – if Kitson’s helicopter had a flight recorder...

Bobbi whips her phone out and taps out a quick text.

‘I’ve got Nelson on standby,’ she explains, ‘I’ll ask him to get a warrant for the helicopter’s black box and send someone over to Flare to search for evidence on the roof. It’s a long shot, but if something turns up,’ she gives Fitz a begrudgingly approving smile, ‘you might just be onto something.’

‘Is that how he got in the second time, though?’ Daisy wonders. ‘I thought the doors were open when you guys got there.’

Jemma nods. ‘They were. I stopped going onto the roof after Fitz found me there. They had to find another way in.’

‘Which was what, exactly?’

Fitz holds up Piper’s phone, which she has lent to him for the demonstration. Both Daisy and Bobbi lean in closer to look at the jumping pixels showing on the screen.

‘Eco-Quest,’ he says.

Daisy lets out a bark of laughter. ‘Please tell me you’re joking.’

‘Unfortunately,’ Jemma says, pulling a face, ‘he’s not. We asked Allen and Rose to take a closer look at the app’s programming and it’s true. Kitson have been using Eco-Quest to surveillance Flare.’

It had been a fraught evening the two of them had spent with Allen and Rose in the technology lab. Allen was an avid player of the game and had refused to even consider the possibility that it was being used to spy on Flare until the evidence was right in front of him.

‘Half of your employees have the app downloaded,’ Fitz explains, ‘but it only needed one of them to be able to gain access to the building’s security system. Elena. The others were just an added bonus, especially when Piper downloaded it.’

‘It gave them access to her emails and messages,’ Jemma says, the slightest tremor to her voice. ‘They knew exactly where I would be on the day of the shooting. All they had to do was wait.’

Daisy lets out a long exhalation, dismay clouding her expression. Fitz feels a stab of sympathy for her – she’d done what she thought was the best thing and it had ended up unwittingly hurting someone she cared about. He knew all about how that felt. He makes a mental note to tell her later that it hadn’t been her fault.

‘Alright,’ Bobbi says quietly. She is nodding, her eyes scanning the papers in front of her as if she is building her case right here in Jemma’s living room. She looks up, meets Fitz’s eye, and smiles. ‘Let’s make this work.’

Once they have both gone, Jemma turns to him. She steps into his arms and Fitz holds her close, breathing in the sweet smell of her hair. She is trembling, and he can’t tell whether it is from nerves or excitement. If she is feeling anything like what he is feeling, it is probably a little bit of both.

He draws her away from him, very slightly, so that he can look into her face.

‘Are you ready for this?’

There is a fire burning bright in Jemma’s eyes as she nods at him, a spark that seems to leap from her heart to his.

‘As long as I’m with you,’ she says, ‘I’m ready for anything.’

Jemma’s heart is racing as she hurries down the corridor, the words the judge had spoken just minutes ago still ringing in her ears. _Guilty_. It makes her feel lighter than air to remember it, to know that the nightmare of the last year is finally – _finally_ – over. Kitson has been found guilty of Lucas James’s murder.

The halls of the court room are packed, and there is a buzz to the air as people crowd together, excitedly discussing the hearing. Jemma hears only snatches of conversation as she pushes past them. They are talking about the tears Kitson had shed on the stand, about Daisy’s ice cold quips delivered between her evidence, about Bobbi’s relentless questioning that had elicited the confession from the pale-faced henchman. They are talking about her, and how she had stood tall as a reed when she had identified him as Lucas’s killer.

Jemma isn’t really paying attention to them, though. Right now, she only has eyes for the ripple in the crowd in front of her. Fitz steps forward, breathing heavily, like he has been running to reach her. When he spots her, his face breaks into a radiant grin and it feels like the sun coming out after months of rain.

Jemma’s feet move without direct instruction from her brain. Before she knows what is happening, she is in Fitz’s arms and he is lifting her clear off her feet. A wave of giddy laughter rises in Jemma’s chest and she presses her smile into his neck as he spins her around and around. Her stomach twinges a little at the motion, but right now Jemma doesn’t care. They are in a room full of people, but once he sets her back on the ground she pulls him forward to press her lips to his.

Fitz kisses her back, his hands coming up to tangle in her hair.

‘You did it,’ he whispers.

Jemma chuckles. ‘ _You_ did it,’ she corrects him. ‘Bobbi says the evidence you collected made for a far easier ruling.’

‘No,’ Fitz says, shaking his head. With his thumb, he caresses her cheek. ‘It was you, Jemma. It was always going to be you, and your brave heart, that ended this. You got justice for Lucas.’ He beams at her. ‘You did it.’

Tears well up in Jemma’s eyes and, for a moment, she has to close them. She feels Fitz’s fingers slide between her own, interlocking them.

‘Thank you,’ she breathes. ‘For everything.’

She opens her eyes just in time to catch the loving look Fitz is giving her. It makes her heart feel like it is going to burst.

‘You’re welcome,’ he says, bending forward to touch his forehead to hers.

A flash of light out of the corner of her eye snaps Jemma out of her daze. She blinks, suddenly remembering where they are. An abundance of cameras and journalists are swarming the courthouse, all of them on the lookout for the juiciest gossip from the Kitson trial. She guesses that that flash meant some reporter had just bagged a shot that was going to get them tomorrow morning’s front page.

She looks to Fitz and finds an uncertainty on his face as if he has just come to the same realisation. He glances at her, nervously.

‘So, what comes next?’

Jemma purses her lips in thought. There are many things that he could be referring to. He could be talking about the hoard of journalists outside the courthouse doors, and how they will most likely have to escape out the back door to avoid them. He could also be talking about the meeting they need to arrange with Bobbi to rearrange the hearing for her shooting. Knowing Fitz, he could just as easily be asking her what she wants for supper. But Jemma suspects that he is talking about something else entirely.

‘I’m not sure,’ she admits, then tilts her head at him with a smile. ‘Shall we find out?’

Fitz’s grin returns to his face and he nods, holding up their joint hands to show that he is ready. They step forward together, out of the courthouse doors and into the daylight beyond, where the future is waiting for them, whatever they decide to make of it.


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "There is a shirt on Fitz’s back, a glass of champagne in his hand, and a tie around his neck that seems to be squeezing tighter with every second that passes. He wiggles his shoulders uncomfortably. While he has become more used to these kind of functions over the last year, he isn’t sure he will ever be content about the uniform he has to wear to attend them. Jemma had told him that evening that she didn’t mind if he didn’t wear the jacket and tie, that he would be smart enough in just his shirt, but Fitz had determined to wear them anyway. While he knows she is proud of him however he dresses, he wants to do this for her. However much she might try to deny it, tonight is, after all, all about Jemma."
> 
> Happily ever afters.

There is a shirt on Fitz’s back, a glass of champagne in his hand, and a tie around his neck that seems to be squeezing tighter with every second that passes. He wiggles his shoulders uncomfortably. While he has become more used to these kind of functions over the last year, he isn’t sure he will ever be content about the uniform he has to wear to attend them. Jemma had told him that evening that she didn’t mind if he didn’t wear the jacket and tie, that he would be smart enough in just his shirt, but Fitz had determined to wear them anyway. While he knows she is proud of him however he dresses, he wants to do this for her. However much she might try to deny it, tonight is, after all, all about Jemma.

Flare’s lobby is so packed with people that Fitz has to turn himself sideways to avoid the clusters of guests as he makes his way across it. The men are wearing sleek suits and the women are dressed in brightly-coloured dresses and jumpsuits, all of them laughing as they clink glasses taken from the open bar set up on Rick’s reception desk. Fairy lights twinkle from the ceiling and hang over the plant pots on the walls, making the lobby appear like a magical grotto in the moonlight.

Eventually, Fitz reaches a spot by the wall where he can lean, sipping his champagne as he gazes out at the room. Looking at the sea of faces before him, some that he knows and some that he doesn’t, he marvels at how far Flare has managed to come since he’d first walked through its doors, despite all the obstacles thrown in Daisy and Jemma’s way.

It was now almost a full twelve months since Daisy had bought out Kitson Computers using the initial profits from the Sunburst line. She’d closed the deal with the company’s lawyers shortly after the hearing for Jemma’s shooting, and had smoothly amalgamated the two tech giants into one. Any Kitson employee who wanted to stay on was welcome, any who wished to leave was given a generous pay-out and a promise of an excellent reference. It was not surprising that most elected to stay.

With Flare’s employees and client base doubling almost overnight, the company’s security needs had risen with them. Mack had been more than happy to provide Jemma and Daisy with an elite team of protection officers and security personnel, all of whom were taken under Piper’s wing to be trained in the day-to-day realities of working for a company like Flare. But a team like that needed a leader – or, potentially, two.

Even a year on, Fitz finds himself grinning as he remembers the day Daisy had offered him the role of Head of Security, shared with Elena. He loves his job. He loves the responsibility he has and how no two days ever play out the same. More than anything, though, he loves that he can always delegate a task to accompany Jemma when she has to go to a meeting or visit a warehouse. There is no one he’d rather sit beside, and he knows she feels the same way. He can tell by the way she smiles at him when she thinks he isn’t looking.

‘Fitz!’

The sound of Bobbi’s voice by his elbow makes him jump about a foot in the air. Hastily, he brushes the spilled champagne off his suit sleeve.

‘Oh, hi, Bobbi.’

She shakes her head at him in exasperation.

‘What the hell are you still doing _here_? They’re about to start.’

‘About to…?’

With a quick glance at his watch, Fitz is alarmed to see that the evening has gone by much faster than he’d thought it had. It is approaching nine pm, and Jemma and Daisy are about to make a speech to their gathered guests.

Bobbi takes him by the arm and steers him through the crowds. They make it to the far corner, where a makeshift stage has been built, just in time to watch Daisy step forward to tap on the microphone for attention.

‘Good evening, everybody,’ she says, instantly drawing the guests’ attention. A hush falls over the room as they all turn to face the stage. Daisy smiles. ‘I’d like to thank you all for being here tonight. Flare has changed a lot over the last few months and I’m so happy to see that so many of our friends have come along for the ride. It really means a lot to my partner and I.’

She glances over her shoulder.

‘Speaking of, I believe she’s got a few words she’d like to say to you. Ladies and gentlemen, please give it up for the deputy CEO of Flare, Jemma Simmons!’

The room erupts with applause, Fitz clapping harder than anyone else. Pride fills his chest, and he has to suppress the urge to whoop as Jemma steps onto the stage. She has curled her hair and is wearing a deep green dress. The delicate silver necklace he’d given to her for her birthday sits settled against her creamy skin.

By now, Fitz has seen her in any number of different dresses and outfits. He has seen her in make-up and without it, he has seen her damp from the shower and drowsy from sleep. He has seen her lying in a hospital bed and he has seen her in a courtroom, standing up for what she believes in. Despite this, every time he sees her it feels like he has to catch his breath like it is the very first time. Jemma grows more beautiful to him with every day he spends by her side.

She blushes as the applause continues, and her eyes scan the crowd eagerly until they find his own. In that moment, the room seems to shrink to the two of them. Fitz smiles at her, hoping she can read in his face the faith he has in her to deliver this speech. When Jemma smiles back, he knows that she has. He watches, as she takes a deep breath.

‘Good evening,’ she says, her voice echoing across the room. ‘It’s wonderful to have you all here. As Daisy said, Flare has undergone a lot of changes over the last year. And while most of those have had positive outcomes, not all of them have.’ She swallows. ‘I know that better than anyone.’

Fitz feels a pang. While her nightmares don’t happen so often nowadays, she does still get them. Sometimes they are bad enough for him to be woken by her crying out. When that happens, he wakes her gently and holds her until her shoulders stop shaking enough for her to fall back to sleep. He sees the scar on her stomach too, a faint pink line that flushes red every time he presses his lips to it. It reminds him every time how lucky he is to have her.

Jemma clears her throat. ‘Bad things have happened. But I refuse to let Flare become diminished by them. Just as I refuse to be diminished by what has happened to me.’ She looks back to Fitz and smiles, just for him. ‘In fact, I truly believe that I am better because of it, and because of what it has led me to.’

Tears spring to Fitz’s eyes as he returns the smile, as broadly as he can. At first, he’d been so afraid of his feelings, so scared that falling in love with her would make him worse at his job. Now, he realises just how wrong he had been. Their love makes him stronger, and he hopes it always will.

‘But,’ Jemma continues, ‘I also realise that sometimes it can be hard to see past bad things. To believe that, out of the darkness, light can grow. Which is why I’m honoured to announce that in the spring Flare will be beginning a new programme: the Lucas James internship. We will be inviting the best technology students from the city’s university to join us here and help us built a brighter future.’ She takes a deep breath. ‘We will remember our dark times by turning them into light.’

There is a pause as she comes to the end of her speech. But then one person begins to clap, and then another, and soon the room is filled once more with thunderous applause. Fitz joins them, unable to tear his eyes away from Jemma as she stands on the stage, shining as bright as the promise she’d just made. He believes her, with every fibre of his being.

Daisy steps forward, taking Jemma’s place at the microphone. She begins to talk, explaining about the practicalities of the internship and how the interns will be chosen, but Fitz is no longer listening. He moves to the edge of the stage, ready to help Jemma off as she clambers down. She all but falls into his arms, hugging him tightly.

‘Well?’ she asks breathlessly, ‘how did I do?’

‘Perfect,’ Fitz tells her. ‘You were perfect.’

Jemma beams at him and tucks her hand into his. ‘I can hardly believe my work on the internship over,’ she says with a sigh, as they start to wind their way through the crowds.

‘I don’t think it’s completely over,’ Fitz points out. ‘You still have to choose the interns, and find a project for them to work on.’

‘Oh, I’ve found them a project already.’ There is a twinkle in Jemma’s eye, or it could just have been the reflection of the fairy lights. ‘How does revamping Eco-Quest so that it’s _not_ an illegal surveillance software sound to you?’

Fitz lets out a huff of laughter. ‘I thought Flare didn’t need playful gimmicks.’

‘We don’t. But, well, recent events have shown me that people enjoy them so much that one or two can’t hurt – most of the time.’

Fitz grins to himself.

‘What I meant was,’ Jemma continues, ‘that I’ve spent so much of the last few months organising it. All the meetings with the university, the finance department…this project took up so much of my time. What am I supposed to do with myself now?’

‘I suppose,’ Fitz says, ‘now you’ll have to find some other way to fill your time.’

Jemma gives a low chuckle. ‘Any suggestions for me?’

They have come to a stop at the back of the crowd gathered around the stage. It is quieter there, and cooler, but Fitz feels his face heat up as he soaks in the desire in her eyes. He bends forward, brushing his nose against hers.

‘I might have a few ideas.’

He can feel Jemma’s cheeks lift as she smiles, but before he can kiss her, she lifts a finger to his lips.

‘Wait,’ she whispers, and takes him by the hand to tug him out of the lobby.

There is a small courtyard garden built in Flare’s atrium, with a water feature, skylight, and flower and herb beds built around the edges. It is a popular place during the day for employees to spend their breaks, but tonight it is empty as Jemma leads Fitz into it. Flickering lanterns have been set on the grass, bathing the garden in a warm, romantic glow and making Jemma’s dress shimmer every time she moves. Fitz can barely wait until they are seated on a bench before drawing her close and kissing her.

Jemma grins into his mouth as she deepens the kiss, her fingers curling around the back of his neck. Fitz feels a shiver run down his spine and he dips his head forward, pulling at her dress until she is sitting on his lap, her weight warm and deliciously heavy.

Kissing Jemma feels like belonging. Yet, at the same time, it always feels like something new. Fitz hopes that this feeling never fades, that her lips will always send his heart soaring and his hands reaching out to bring her home.

Usually, he prides himself on being able to make Jemma feel the same way, on his ability to pay such gentle attention to her bottom lip that she will make that little moan that he loves so much. Tonight, though, there is a small niggling at the back of his mind that keeps distracting him, in spite of how silky Jemma’s dress feels beneath his fingertips. After a few minutes, she lifts her head.

‘Fitz?’ Her breath tickles his throat as she touches his cheek. ‘Is everything alright?’

‘Yeah. Of course.’ Fitz kisses the corner of her mouth as reassurance. ‘I’m just still thinking about your speech.’

‘Oh? Any part in particular?’

Fitz is quiet for a moment as he collects his thoughts. ‘Do you still think about it a lot? How so many bad things had to happen for us to end up together?’

It is an abrupt mood changer, and he would be worried about bringing it up if it was anyone other than Jemma. She doesn’t pull away from him; instead, she sits back and clasps her hands on the back of his neck.

‘I do still think about it sometimes,’ she admits. ‘But I don’t feel guilty about it. We can’t change what’s already happened. All that we can do is make what we have now count. Which is what we’re doing, isn’t it?’

She looks at him, chewing on her lower lip thoughtfully, and the light reflecting in her eyes illuminates Fitz’s whole world. Deep inside him, he feels something lift.

‘You’re the love of my life, Jemma,’ he says simply. ‘I make every day I have with you count.’

Jemma’s face breaks into a radiant smile, but Fitz doesn’t get to admire it for long. She surges forward and captures his lips with her own, drawing him in to a deep and tender kiss. Fitz closes his eyes and allows himself to be lost in the love he feels for her.

As he threads his fingers backwards into Jemma’s hair, he is suddenly acutely aware of their heartbeats, pulsing louder and louder until their rhythms match and it feels like they are beating as one. Fitz grins into her lips as he presses her closer. It reminds him of how perfectly they belong together.

He and Jemma guard each other’s hearts and, as he kisses her tonight amid the lantern light, Fitz truly believes that this was the way it was always meant to be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you to all of you for reading, kudos-ing and commenting on this along the way! it really means a lot to me and i'm so glad if you've enjoyed reading this. i had a lot of fun writing it and i'm really proud of it as my longest fic to date. if you have questions or want to chat i'm always happy to talk on tumblr @jeemmasimmons or twitter @jemmasimmmons!


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